5G and Beyond: Smart Devices as part of the Network Fabric
Baldomero Coll-Perales, Javier Gozalvez, Juan Luis Maestre

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that combining device-centric wireless communications with demand-driven opportunistic networking significantly enhances cellular spectral efficiency, supporting a paradigm shift towards edge networking on smart devices.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence from field tests showing substantial spectral efficiency gains using device-centric networks with existing 4G and Wi-Fi technologies.
Findings
Spectral efficiency improved by up to 4.7 times in pedestrian scenarios.
Spectral efficiency improved by up to 12 times in vehicular scenarios.
Field tests confirm the potential of device-centric networks to enhance cellular performance.
Abstract
5G networks mainly rely on infrastructure-centric cellular solutions to address data traffic and service demands. Continuously scaling infrastructure-centric cellular networks is not exempt of challenges, and beyond 5G networks should consider the active coexistence and coordination of infrastructure-centric and device-centric wireless networks. Device-centric wireless networks will build from D2D and MCNs. Device-centric wireless networks can push the limits of edge computing and networking to smart devices (including smartphones, vehicles, machines and robots), and exploit their mobile computing, storage and connectivity capabilities. These capabilities can be more efficiently utilized using demand-driven opportunistic networking that establishes the connections between devices and nodes based on their capacity to support the requested demand and services. This paper presents results…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
