5G: Towards Energy-Efcient, Low-Latency and
High-Reliable Communications Networks
Shunqing Zhang, Xiuqiang Xu, Yiqun Wu and Lei Lu
Huawei Technologies, Co. Ltd., Shanghai, China
Email: {zhangshunqing, xuxiuqiang, wuyiqun, kevin.lu}@huawei.com
(Invited Paper)
AbstractIn the past few decades, wireless communications
have been evolved from GSM system (2G) to LTE-A networks
(4G) with the major interest focusing on the throughput related
criteria. 5G communication networks, however, extend to a 3-D
performance metric cube based on throughput, number of links
and delay simultaneously. Moreover, 5G networks confronts a
wider range of future applications, including person-to-person,
person-to-machine, or even machine-to-machine types. To deal
with all the above cases and challenges, we start from the
investigation of most popular 5G scenarios and identify the
requirements on the energy efciency, reliability and delay.
Detailed technologies are surveyed and discussed thereafter,
to achieve critical requirements and facilitate the fundamental
tradeoffs among 3-D performance criteria. Through this study,
we hope to shed some lights on the novel 5G communication
system design, and further pave the way towards energy efcient,
low latency and high reliable communication networks.
Index Terms5G, energy efcient, low latency, high reliable,
non-orthogonal multiple access
I. I NTRODUCTION
In the past few decades, wireless communications have been
evolved from GSM system (2G) to LTE-A networks (4G)
with the major interest focusing on the throughput related
criteria. While in the pioneering work of the next generation
(5G) communications, researchers start to consider a 3-D
performance metric cube based on throughput, number of links
and delay simultaneously. With the vision to have 1000 times
throughput enhancement, 100 billions connections and close-
to-zero delay, 5G wireless communication networks attracted
global research attention in the recent years. For example,
the European Union initiated an integrated project in the sev-
enth framework program (FP7) named Mobile and wireless
communications Enablers for the Twenty-twenty Information
Society (METIS) [1], which aims to lay the foundation of
5G mobile and wireless communications system, and the Chi-
nese government formed an ofcial promotion group named
International Mobile Telecommunications Twenty-Twenty
(IMT 2020) for joint 5G research and standard promotion. In
addition, industrial partners from vendors and operations are
highly motivated to investigate their internal research programs
and actively joining collaborative research projects for 5G
communications, including Ericsson, Huawei, T-Mobile and
others.
It is also promising to see that with the booming of mobile
internet, 5G wireless communications will confront a wider
978-1-4799-5832-0/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE
range of future communication applications, including person-
to-person (P2P), person-to-machine (P2M), or even machine-
to-machine (M2M) types, which raises additional challenges
for the innovative network design. To name a few, vehicle-to-
vehicle (V2V) communications requires high reliable guaran-
tee for emergency cases, and real-time industrial control or vir-
tual reality gaming demands for extremely low latency. Typical
applications like sporting events and video conferencing may
strike a balance between the reliability and delay requirements.
Moreover, with the massive deployment of small cells and
access points, energy efciency problem [2] will be another
important aspect to investigate, which is also shown to be the
key performance metric of 5G systems [3]. Nevertheless, the
above three metrics may tradeoff with each other, and thus
there will be no unied solution to solve all the issues and
satisfy all the requirements from all the scenarios.
To tackle the above issues, naturally we need to gure out
a series of technologies, including the physical layer coding
and modulation up to all the network topology and routing
schemes. In this article, we start from the investigation of most
popular 5G scenarios and identify the requirements on the
energy efciency, reliability and delay. Detailed technologies
are surveyed and discussed thereafter to achieve critical re-
quirements and facilitate the tradeoff among 3-D performance
criteria, which further paves the way for energy efcient, low
latency and high reliable communication networks. The rest
of the paper is organized as follows. We rst summarize the
potential important scenarios according to the underlying com-
munication behaviors and propose framework solutions for
5G communication systems in Section II. Typical technology
families from the network architecture, the medium access
control (MAC) mechanism and the physical layer schemes
are elaborated in Section III to Section V. We give some
concluding remarks in Section VI.
II. S CENARIOS , TARGETS AND F RAMEWORK S OLUTIONS
Apart from the traditional 4G personal communications, 5G
aims to exploit more communication opportunities in the social
activities and penetrates into nearly everyones daily lives.
However, it makes more challenging to predict the complicated
5G communication behaviors, either for P2P, P2M or M2M
communications. In this article, we investigate the evolutions
of human activities and generate the implicit rules based on
the current observations.
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Fig. 1. Typical application scenarios of energy efcient, low latency and
Targets Delay: 100 ms Delay: 20 ms Delay: 5 ms
high reliable communication networks. We mainly categorize them into three
classes depending on the backbone communication behaviors. Reliab.: 107 Reliab.: 109 Reliab.: 105

Smart Living People in 2020 shall enjoy a more con-
vinient life than the current days. For example, the
medical cares may happen at home through remote con-
nections and most of the buildings may equipped with
smart devices or sensors. Virtual reality (VR) gaming,
real-time VR conferences and other communication aided
applications will eventually penetrate to every corner of
our daily lives.
Smart Transportation Transportation systems will be
upgraded to facilitate the intelligent communications
among different cars. Typical applications may include
the emergency reporting, automatic cruise control as well
as augmented reality (AR) navigation, which eventually
provides more comfortable driving experiences in 2020.
Smart Control Another important aspect shall happen
in the industrial control systems for emergency cases.
Timely and accurate reactions need to be performed when
the environment induced turbulence occurs. Meanwhile,
major sporting events or festival ceremony may require
the similar control techniques.
Fig. 1 summarizes the most popular scenarios based on
the current survey results, where we categorize them into
three typical classes based on the underlying communication
principles. The rst class is called Massive Reporting, which
corresponds to the massive uplink reporting and the large
scale downlink transmission for smart control capabilities. The
typical behaviors include massive uplink transmission requests
and wide range downlink broadcasting phenomena. Reliable
M2M is the second one, which targets to provide high
reliable machine communications for bidirectional information
exchange. The third class named Real-time Virtualization is
focusing on the VR applications for driving, gaming or confer-
encing, which basically relies on the point-to-point information
streaming. Table I provides an overview of different classes
and describes the corresponding design targets measured by
link densities, delay and reliability requirements.
In order to achieve the aforementioned goal and balance
the tradeoffs among different criteria for 5G communication
systems, framework solutions with exible and recongurable
properties shall be considered as top priority and the associated
challenging problems may include: 1) How to balance the
control signal overhead and the massive access capability? 2)
How to reduce the multiple access delay and meet the close-
to-zero end-to-end delay requirement? 3) How to deliver
information reliably before the transmission deadline? 4) How
to operate the network efciently when massive cells are
deployed? In what follows, we focus on layered structures to
organize the potential research directions, which are dedicated
to solve the associated issues in network, medium access and
physical layers.
III. N ETWORK A RCHITECTURE
Mobile internet has changed our daily lives signicantly and
triggered large scale deployment of wireless communication
networks. Compared with traditional mobile networks, todays
network architecture is much more complicated, either in
terms of network functionalities or inter-connection relations.
To facilitate the exible network control and reduce the
network capital and operational expenditures, two compli-
mentary concepts, Software Dened Networks (SDN) [4]
and Network Functionality Virtualization (NFV) [5] have
been promoted by both the IT and the telecom industries,
and the standardization process has also been initiated in the
various organizations, such as European Telecommunications
Standards Institute (ETSI) [5] or Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) [4].
Nevertheless, in the wireless base stations or access points,
upper layer information with different network functionalities
will be jointly transmitted using a uniform physical layer
protocol and the quality of services is guaranteed through con-
trol plane signaling. This approach requires the control plane
signaling overhead to proportionally increase with the total
amount of transmitted data. Moreover, in the massively de-
ployed communication networks, roaming-induced handover
signaling problems become more serious and incur the so
called signaling storm in the radio network controllers.

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Fig. 2. A candidate network architecture for 5G communication systems,
where the SDN, NFV and control-data separation technique are adopted. To
be more specic, SDN and NFV focus on the functionality virtualization and
hardware normalization in the core network side, while the control plane and
data plane separation are mainly implemented in the radio access network
side. Through the proper cooperation between newly developed core network
and radio access network, 5G user equipments can enjoy a much better quality
of experience, e.g. with lower access delay and higher reliability.
As a result, the radio access network architecture for 5G
communication shall align with the development of SDN
and NFV, and decouple the control plane signaling from the
traditional transmission approaches to avoid the mentioned
issues.
Fig. 2 provides a candidate solution for 5G communication
networks. In order to extend the control and data separation
concept in the radio access networks, [6] suggested a uni-
ed framework to jointly deliver the wireless signals based
on the proposed functionality separation concept. Through
this approach, the traditional admission control and system
information maintenance will be covered by the control base
stations and the data base stations can focus on pure data
transmission, which results in lower transmission delay and
higher reliability. Meanwhile, by adopting this framework, the
data base stations can highly adapt to the trafc variations via
efcient switch on/off schemes and offer much more energy
efcient networks.
Within the separation framework, several interesting re-
search problems are still open in the literature. For example,
the efcient network deployment problems, the optimized
199
Fig. 3. Software-dened MAC protocols for 5G communication systems,
where different base stations can equipped with different MAC protocols to
deliver different types of data information. For example, as shown in the
gure, the streaming packet with large payload (pico cell) may need reliable
MAC header and additional redundancy check bits while the voice or instant
message applications with tiny packet size (macro cell) may get rid of those
unnecessary overheads.
routing and coordination protocols and the smart backhaul
mechanisms, which are shown to be the key enabling tech-
nologies for for the separated base stations. We refer inter-
ested readers to [6] and references therein for more detailed
discussions.
IV. MAC M ECHANISMS
One of the most critical tasks for 5G MAC layer design is to
provide diversied delay and reliability requirements. In order
to balance this tradeoff, traditional ways to provide uniform
package and equal redundancy check is no longer sustainable
and the most promising solution is intended to introduce a
exible MAC protocol design with dynamic scheduling and
variable packet length characteristics. However, to achieve
such a goal is not as simple as performing some marginal
modications due to the coordination nature among different
MAC functions and the interaction property with the lower
physical layer transmissions. In this section, we introduce
two important research directions for the exible MAC layer
design in the following part.
The straight forward way to design the MAC mechanisms
for 5G communication systems is to incorporate the software
dened MAC concept. Different data transmission require-
ments will be allocated to different types of base stations with
local caching capabilities as shown in Fig. 3. Each base station
employs a recongurable MAC protocol according to the data
applications, e.g., the streaming packet with large payload
may need reliable MAC header and additional redundancy
check bits while the voice or instant message applications
 Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE ICCS
with tiny packet size may get rid of those unnecessary over-
heads. Through the software dened MAC approach, specic
trafc quality requirements can be supported by different
MAC protocols with different MAC headers, payload sizes
or redundancy check bits, which balances the tradeoffs among
delay, reliability and energy efciency.
Another potential direction for designing the novel MAC
mechanisms is to consider the user-centric scheduling,
where the radio resource management and the transmission
mode adaptation are mainly moved from the base station to
the user terminal side. In the user-centric scheduling, the
user terminal exploits available resources, make the scheduling
decision according to the current trafc requirements and
noties the nal result to the base station. Compared with
the current network-centric solution, user-centric approach
avoids the traditional resource request/grant procedures and
reduces the random access as well as the queueing delays.
However, to facilitate this type of scheduling mechanism, we
need several pre-requested conditions. The rst one is to have
sufcient physical layer resources with smart distributive re-
source management schemes to avoid the collision problem in
the random access procedures. Smooth handover mechanism
is selected as the second one to handle the user roaming
related issues, including the discontinuous transmission and
the cooperative reception. Other conditions shall also include
the forward error detection and notication process, the packet
retransmission and the efcient exponential backoff protocol.
The above discussions brings two novel directions, which
requires signicant changes in the current MAC layer proce-
dures. Other potential MAC layer evolution possibilities may
include the ultra fast HARQ protocol or the low overhead or
even zero overhead handover procedures. In addition, since the
physical layer for 5G systems has not been nalized yet, it is
also possible to introduce additional MAC control parameters
for advanced signal transmission or processing.
V. P HYSICAL L AYER S CHEMES
To have a better matching with the exible MAC mecha-
nisms, the physical layer design in 5G systems shall provide
a tunable air interface design with adaptable frame structures,
waveforms and other transmission technologies. In this sec-
tion, instead of proposing a fully integrated software dened
air interface, which is so far open in the literature, we elaborate
several key technology components as follows.
One of the key enabling technologies in 5G physical layer
is to adapt the frame structure according to the MAC payload.
Conventional approach using xed frame structure relies on
the coding and modulation schemes to adapt the transmission
rate with constant control overhead1 . While in the massive
reporting scenarios with huge small packet delivering, new
frame structure with limited control overhead and shorter
transmission durations needs to be identied. Meanwhile,
short block length causes signicant performance degradation
1 The control overhead in the physical layer frame include the cyclic prex,
the pilot symbols, and the transmission mode indicators in frame control areas.
for regular channel coding schemes, which motivates extra
research efforts for the next generation channel coding tech-
nologies, including polar code [7] and multi-dimensional low-
density parity check code [8].
New waveforms are considered as the second key enabling
technology in the physical layer. In 4G communication sys-
tems, out-of-band (OOB) power emission is often regarded as
one of the practical threats for the OFDM-based waveform and
the traditional approach to deal with this issue is to introduce
the guard band intervals, which requires up to 10% margin of
the total bandwidth. Recently, the ltering based waveform is
proposed to tackle the OOB leakage problems by introducing
the non-orthogonality among neighboring subcarriers. For ex-
ample, Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM)
[9], as a generalization of traditional OFDM waveform, is
invented to achieve higher spectrum efciency by OOB elim-
ination in a broadband system and Filter-Bank Multi-Carrier
(FBMC) [10] forces zero energy at the integer multiples of the
symbol period by jointly designing two half-Nyquist lters at
the transmitter and the receiver, which provides an exciting
approach to completely remove CP while still maintaining
the reasonable OOB performance in the frequency selective
environment.
Other transmission technologies in the 5G research are
dedicated to create more transmission resources to improve
the delay and reliability performance. The brute-force ways
to increase the radio resources are focused in the frequency
domain (e.g., the utilization of millimeter wave [11]) or the
spatial domain (e.g., the massive MIMO technology [12] or the
ultra dense network deployment [13]). Another way to create
virtual resources is to realize the non-orthogonality property
in the user domain, where the spreading sequence/matrix
technique is applied to enhance the number of simultaneous
serving links. For example, [14] proposed an enhanced CDMA
technology in OFDM systems and [15] proposes a possible
solution to use Low Density Signature (LDS) based spreading
technique for CDMA systems with reasonable multi-user
interference performance loss and affordable computational
complexity, and [16] extends this idea to OFDM systems.
However, in LDS-OFDM systems, entries of the signature
matrix in LDS-OFDM systems are restricted to zero or one
only. If we consider the downlink transmission direction,
modulated symbols from different users will be naturally
coupled together at the transmitter side, which may cause
signicant performance degradation. To solve this issue, sparse
code multiple access (SCMA) [17] was recently proposed to
allow complex entries in the signature matrix and each user
enjoys a different codebook to avoid the coupling issues as
shown in Fig. 4.
The previous discussions are mainly point-wise technologies
with limited interactions. In order to provide a unied physical
layer transmission framework, the coexistence issues among
the above solutions and the backward compatibility shall be
carefully investigated. Besides, the additional inuences on
the MAC and higher layer protocols, the feasibility for multi-
point/multi-channel coordinations, and the hardware imple-
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efcient, low latency and high reliable networks, we adopt top-
down approach to consider the potential framework solutions
from network architecture, MAC mechanisms as well as phys-
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separated network with software dened MAC, the user-
centric scheduling as well as the adaptive air interface are
investigated. By integrating all the valuable solutions together,
we hope to make 5G as an energy efcient, low latency and
high reliable communication networks.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This paper is in part supported by the National High
Technology Research and Development Program of China
(863 Program No. 2012AA011400) and the National Basic Re-
search Program of China (973 Program No. 2012CB316000).

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