Workshop on Heterogeneous Converged Networks

Future Wireless Network Architecture - MyNET and SONACFuture 5G wireless networks will face new challenges, including (i) increasing demand on network capacity to support a large number of devices running applications requiring high data rates and always-on connectivity, (ii) immensely diverse service requirements and characteristics, and (iii) supporting the emerging business models in the wireless network market requiring the networks to be more open. New challenges drive new solutions and require different strategies in the network deployment, management, and operation of future 5G wireless networks compared with those of current wireless networks. One of the key objectives of future 5G wireless networks is to provide service-customized networks using the wireless and wired network resources provided by different network operators and, in the same time, to most efficiently utilize the network resources and to simplify network operations. In this talk, we describe a novel wireless network architecture, MyNET, and one of the key enabling techniques called Service Oriented virtual Network Auto-Creation (SONAC).5G-RAN: fine-tuning the protocol stack for vertical industries5G networks are expected to cater for the needs of a diverse set of services and applications in different deployment scenarios. Meeting the requirements of different vertical application areas (e.g., smart metering, smart grid, V2V communication, etc) will not be easily achieved by the existing 4G-RAN architecture. Meeting the verticals' KPIs will call for a paradigm shift from simply offering different QoS levels in a homogeneous network to providing different and fully optimized protocol stacks for every different case. The purpose of this presentation is to analyze how the 5G-RAN is expected to be affected by this approach and provide an example on how the system architecture can be fine tuned for a simple case.

The telecommunication industry is entering a new era, called 5G which to support 1000 times higher mobile data volume per area, 100 times higher number of connected devices, 5 times reduced E2E latency. We envision that the future wireless networks will be the co-existence of multiple types of deployment scenarios, the co-existence of multiple types of radio access specifications, and the co-existence of a vast variety of services and applications. A looming problem is how to identify a novel network architecture and many essential technology components, to fulfill these requirement. A feasible cost-efficient solution is to integrate several existing network resources, which have been allocated for different services, to form a single heterogeneous converged network. These existing networks operate independently on different frequency bands, including the cellular network, video broadcast, wireless sensor network (WSN), device-to-device (D2D) network, and wireless local area network (WLAN). Each of them, stand alone, has its own historic justification, but suffering certain drawbacks in one way or another. For instance, the cellular network was originally designed to offer voice service, lacking an efficient means for broadcasting multimedia contents. Clearly, integrating these heterogeneous networks will constitute a much more powerful unified framework capable to fully exploit the capability and radio resources of all the individual networks, to provide a platform for the internet of things, and to enable users to enjoy a uniform service everywhere by using a software-defined radio device. The benefits of converged networks are promising; yet, the road to the success is filled with challenges. The networks integration necessitates a harmonious interaction among heterogeneous networks at different levels, thus requiring a careful design of network architecture, coordination protocols and resource allocation algorithms for the efficient operation of the converged network.