Polarization and Index Modulations: a Theoretical and Practical Perspective

different domains such as smart cities, smart grids, industrial automation (Industry 4.0), smart driving, elderly assistance, or home automation, among others. Billions of heterogeneous smart devices with different application requirements will be connected to the networks and will generate huge aggregated volumes of data that will be processed in distributed cloud infrastructures. On the other hand, there is also a general trend to deploy functions as software instances in cloud infrastructures (e.g., NFV or MEC). Thus, the next generation of mobile networks, the so-called 5G, will need not to only develop new radio interfaces or waveforms to cope with the expected traffic growth but also to integrate heterogeneous networks from end-to-end with distributed cloud resources to deliver end-to-end IoT and mobile services. This paper presents the first-known end-to-end 5G platform that is being developed by CTTC, capable of reproducing such ambitious scenario. Introduction The fifth generation of mobile networks technology (5G) is not only about the development of new radio interfaces or waveforms. It also deals with the design of end-to-end converged network and cloud infrastructure to facilitate both traditional human-based and emerging Internet of Things (IoT) services. This converged infrastructure, illustrated in Fig. 1, is composed of: i) end-to-end heterogeneous network segments covering radio and fixed access, metro aggregation, and core transport with heterogeneous wireless and optical technologies; ii) massive distributed cloud computing and storage infrastructures; and iii) large amounts of heterogeneous smart devices and terminals for traditional mobile broadband services (e.g., smartphones, tablets, etc.) and IoT services (e.g. sensors, actuators, robots, cars, drones, etc.). At the network level, the requirements for 5G include high The CTTC 5G end-to-end experimental platform Integrating heterogeneous wireless/optical networks, distributed cloud, and IoT devices