Abstract

The target of the researchers working towards 5G communication systems is to achieve high data-rate with high energy efficiency and virtually ubiquitous coverage. This can be referred as 4A paradigm: any rate, anytime, anywhere, affordable.

Our goal is to achieve the abovementioned targets using state-of-the-art PHY layer techniques. One of the potential candidate techniques is Massive MIMO. In this implementation, hundreds of antennas are mounted on a base-station and then using beamforming, tens of users can be served simultaneously in the same frequency-time slot. In this way, data-rate and energy efficiency is increased by many folds.

Base-station cooperation or coordinated-multipoint transmission (CoMP) is another potential technique which will be investigated for 5G cellular systems. Base-stations in the neighboring cells cooperate or coordinate to form virtually large antenna arrays and manage inter-cell interference. Consequently, high data-rate and energy efficiency is achievable using CoMP technique for 5G access networks. Moreover, using this technique, universal single frequency can be used between the neighboring cells.

Recently, researchers around the world have focused attention on mm-Wave frequency spectrum for 5G systems, particularly for backhauling. The main advantage of using mm-Wave frequencies is to increase the bandwidth significantly and thus there is a dramatic increase in the data-rate and energy efficiency.

Similarly, carrier aggregation is another popular technique which can be explored for 5G communication networks. The main advantage of this technique is to increase the bandwidth and hence data-rates and energy efficiency.

Lastly, multi-hop relay networks can be explored in the context of 5G systems with the aim to increase its coverage and/or energy efficiency. In short, different PHY techniques, algorithms and architectures will be studied and implemented as a part of our research on 5G communication systems. After exploring PHY algorithms, as a future work, we will extend our results for cross-layer algorithms for 5G systems.