Trend, technology and architecture of small cell in 5G era

Abstract

With the mobile data traffic increasing, network operators are urgently looking for new technologies for improving capacity, user data-rates, spectrum reuse and latency to fulfill user experience and variant new applications. Small cells will play an important role in the high capacity, densely deployed networks for future 5G networks and the three major use cases: include enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine type communications and ultra-reliable and low latency communications. This work presents the trend, technologies and architecture of small cells in 5G and highlights key techniques such as carrier aggregation, licensed and un-licensed band, mmWave, new waveform, coding and modulation, multi-cell cooperation and advanced MIMO.