Millimeter-Wave Evolution for 5G Cellular Networks

Triggered by the explosion of mobile traffic, 5G cellular network requires evolution to increase the system rate 1000 times higher than the current systems in 10 years. Motivated by this common problem, this paper studies to integrate mm-wave access into current cellular networks as multi-band heterogeneous networks to exploit the ultrawideband aspect of the mm-wave band. This paper provides comprehensive architecture of 5G cellular networks with mm-wave access, where mmwave small cell basestations and a conventional macro basestation are connected to Centralized-RAN to effectively operate the system by enabling power efficient seamless handover as well as centralized resource control including dynamic cell structuring to match the limited coverage of mm-wave access with high traffic user locations via user-plane/controlplane splitting. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed 5G cellular networks with mm-wave access, system level simulation by using expected future traffic model and measurement based mm-wave propagation model is conducted. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed network to realize 1000 times higher system rate than the current network in 10 years which is not achieved by the small cells using commonly considered 3.5 GHz band. Furthermore, the paper also gives latest status of mm-wave devices and regulations to show the feasibility of using mm-wave in the 5G systems. key words: Millimeter-wave, 5G cellular network, small cell, C-RAN, system rate gain