Enabling 5G mobile wireless technologies

Research on 5G mobile wireless technologies has been very active in both academia and industry in the past few years. While there has been certain consensus on the overall requirements of 5G wireless systems (e.g., in data rate, network capacity, delay), various enabling wireless technologies have been considered and studied to achieve these performance targets. It has been quite clear, however, that there would be no single enabling technology that can achieve all diverse and even conflicting 5G requirements. In general, many fundamental changes and innovations to re-engineer the overall network architecture and algorithms in different layers and to exploit new system degrees of freedom would be needed for the future 5G wireless system. In particular, we may need to consider other potential waveform candidates that can overcome limitations of the orthogonal frequency multiple access (OFDM) waveform employed in the current 4G system, develop disruptive technologies to fulfill 5G rate and capacity requirements including network densification, employment of large-scale (massive) multiple input multiple output (MIMO), and exploitation of the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum to attain Gigabit communications. In addition, design tools from the computer networking domain including software defined networking, virtualization, and cloud computing are expected to play important roles in defining the more flexible, intelligent, and efficient 5G network architecture. This paper aims at describing key 5G enabling wireless mobile technologies and discussing their potentials and open research challenges. We also present how papers published in our special issue contribute to the developments of these disruptive 5G technologies.