Special issue on radio access network architectures and resource management for 5G

As a next step in the evolution of mobile communication systems, research carried out by industry and academia, is currently focused on the development of the new generation of mobile and wireless systems, known as 5th Generation (5G) with a time horizon beyond 2020. 5G will provide solutions to the ever-increasing demand for mobile services: the proliferation of bandwidth-intensive applications including high definition video, 3D and virtual reality, the expected increase of Machine To Machine (M2M) communications, the need for extremely reliable communications for services such as e-health, etc. To cope with the abovementioned demands, the requirements of future 5G systems have been already identified at different fora. Some of these requirements include 1000 times higher wireless area capacity, 10 to 100 times higher number of connected devices, 10 to 100 times higher user data rate, 10 times longer battery life for low power Massive Machine Communication devices, and 5 times reduced End-to-End (E2E) latency.