A Survey on 5G: The Next Generation of Mobile Communication

TL;DR

This survey reviews the evolution of 5G networks, discussing their key features, challenges, new technologies, architectures, and implementation issues, highlighting the feasibility through real-world experiments and testbeds.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of 5G technologies, architectures, and challenges, offering a comparative analysis and insights into implementation feasibility.

Findings

Identifies key features and challenges of 5G networks.

Analyzes various proposed architectures based on energy efficiency and network types.

Highlights implementation issues like interference, QoS, security, and load balancing.

Abstract

The rapidly increasing number of mobile devices, voluminous data, and higher data rate are pushing to rethink the current generation of the cellular mobile communication. The next or fifth generation (5G) cellular networks are expected to meet high-end requirements. The 5G networks are broadly characterized by three unique features: ubiquitous connectivity, extremely low latency, and very high-speed data transfer. The 5G networks would provide novel architectures and technologies beyond state-of-the-art architectures and technologies. In this paper, our intent is to find an answer to the question: "what will be done by 5G and how?" We investigate and discuss serious limitations of the fourth generation (4G) cellular networks and corresponding new features of 5G networks. We identify challenges in 5G networks, new technologies for 5G networks, and present a comparative study of the proposed architectures that can be categorized on the basis of energy-efficiency, network hierarchy, and network types. Interestingly, the implementation issues, e.g., interference, QoS, handoff, security-privacy, channel access, and load balancing, hugely effect the realization of 5G networks. Furthermore, our illustrations highlight the feasibility of these models through an evaluation of existing real-experiments and testbeds.