Aspirations, challenges, and open issues for software-based 5G networks in extremely dense and heterogeneous scenarios

An upsurge of heterogeneous wireless devices and wide-ranging applications on extremely dense urban scenarios has led to challenging conditions that cannot be easily handled by 4G systems, such as the inefficient use of the frequency spectrum and the high energy consumption. In order to address those challenges, the 5G system design demands new architectures to cope with specific requirements, such as scalability, resilience, and energy efficiency. These requirements play a fundamental role in extremely dense scenarios. In addition, when jointly addressed, they have distinct priorities depending mainly on the specific user application demands. In this context, this article presents a management architecture for 5G system, called Wireless Software-basEd architecture for Extremely Dense networks (WiSEED). It is grounded on a software-based perspective of management and jointly manages three key operational services, as follows: routing, mobility, and spectrum usage. Such perspective of management is possible due to programmable network technologies, i.e., network function virtualization and software-defined networking. The architecture mainly intends to provide a better trade-off between the 5G requirements themselves and a high quality ubiquitous and seamless services, as well as efficient mobile broadband Internet for end users. Trace-driven simulation results from a case study show improvements when the management architecture is employed over conflicting requirements.