Emerging Air Interfaces and Management Technologies for the 5G era

This Special Issue originates from the international conference EuCNC2016, which was held in June 2016 in Athens, Greece. Initially, it publishes some key contributions presented at the conference describing different aspects in the most recent 5G (5th generation) activities in the areas of Air Interfaces and Management Technologies. The series continues with further articles in the context of the same area. 5G mobile networks/wireless systems are the next step of mobile telecommunication standards, offering services and speed far beyond what 4G may offer. The most recent research activities focus on the development of 5G communications and networks, aiming to be fully available for the consumers through their devices by 2020. The scope of this Special Issue is to focus on aspects like 5G communications and networks technologies and more specifically Air Interfaces and Management Technologies. In the context of this Special Issue, numerous high-quality papers were received. After rigorous peer review, the following papers have been accepted and included in the Special Issue. Context-aware radio resource management below 6 GHz for enabling dynamic channel assignment in the 5G era, authored by Ioannis-Prodromos Belikaidis, Stavroula Vassaki, Andreas Georgakopoulos, Aristotelis Margaris, Federico Miatton, Uwe Herzog, Kostas Tsagkaris, Panagiotis Demestichas. Heterogeneous networks constitute a promising solution to the emerging challenges of 5G networks. According to the specific network architecture, a macro-cell base station (MBS) shares the same spectral resources with a number of small cell base stations (SBSs), resulting in increased cochannel interference (CCI). The efficient management of CCI that has been studied extensively in the literature and various dynamic channel assignment (DCA) schemes have been proposed. However, the majority of these schemes consider a uniform approach for the users without taking into account the different quality requirements of each application. In this work, we propose an algorithm for enabling dynamic channel assignment in the 5G era that receives information about the interference and QoS levels and dynamically assigns the best channel. This algorithm is compared to state-of-the-art channel assignment algorithm. Results show an increase of performance, e.g., in terms of throughput and air interface latency. Finally, potential challenges and way forward are also discussed. The 5G candidate waveform race: a comparison of complexity and performance, authored by Robin Gerzaguet, Nikolaos Bartzoudis, Leonardo Gomes Baltar, Vincent Berg, Jean-Baptiste Doré, Dimitri Kténas, Oriol Font-Bach, Xavier Mestre, Miquel Payaró, Michael Färber and Kilian Roth. 5G will have to cope with a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of services and requirements. Among these latter, the flexible and efficient use of non-contiguous unused spectrum for different network deployment scenarios is considered a key challenge for 5G systems. To maximize spectrum efficiency, the 5G air interface technology will also need to be flexible and capable of mapping various services to the best suitable combinations of frequency and radio resources. In this work, we propose a comparison of several 5G waveform candidates (OFDM, UFMC, FBMC, and GFDM) under a common framework. We assess spectral efficiency, power spectral density, peak-to-average power ratio, and robustness to asynchronous multi-user uplink transmission. Moreover, we evaluate and compare the complexity of the different waveforms. In addition to the complexity analysis, in this work, we also demonstrate * Correspondence: [email protected] University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Demestichas et al. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking