Devaki Chandramouli

A Scalable and Flexible Radio Access Network Architecture for Fifth Generation Mobile Networks

The fifth generation of mobile networks is expected to become the key enabling technology for new services and businesses in the Internet of Things realm, including automotive and industry communications. At the same time, the demand for the “bread and butter” services of mobile broadband will continue to increase, driving the need for ubiquitous data capacity everywhere. Compared to 3GPP LTE, fifth generation radio access networks need to support much more diverse requirements with a wide range of deployment options for infrastructure and spectrum availability. Based on this insight, this article discusses a flexible and scalable radio access network architecture design.

5G multi-RAT multi-connectivity architecture

The 5th generation of mobile networks is envisioned to unify different access types under one system in order to enable efficient and performant operations. We propose a radio network architecture for tight integration of multiple radio access technologies supporting traffic steering, link selection, and aggregation of traffic flows from and to different sources. This enables the radio network architecture to support better throughput, and increased reliability with different levels of mobility. Specifically, we propose a common user plane and control plane across different radio technologies utilizing similar principles, such that the joint operation of radio technologies can be optimized.

5G Mobile Systems for Healthcare

This paper focuses on 5G Mobile Systems for ultra-reliable low latency communications applied to the healthcare use cases, specifically: Wireless Tele Surgery (WTS) - using a mobile console and robotic platforms with video, audio and haptic feed-back; and Wireless Service Robots (WSR) - companion robots or service robots performing tasks of social caretakers, professional personnel or family members. Cyber-sickness and latency between robotic platforms and reasoning servers are the new technical problems the 5G mobile systems are expected to solve, e.g. in hospices, hospitals, homes and campus areas. We firstly describe the 5G functional architecture and key enabling technologies to meet the associated performance requirements. This is followed by a comprehensive analysis of costs and revenues operators and healthcare providers would meet to deliver the corresponding services, if 5G systems were deployed. Business case calculations for the two players show an immediate Return on Investment (RoI) for carriers, whereas the breakeven point for healthcare providers is highly sensitive to the robotic platform price.