Access, Fronthaul and Backhaul Networks for 5G & Beyond

Book excerpt: The widespread use of mobile internet and smart applications has led to an explosive growth in mobile data traffic, which will continue due to the emerging need to connect people, machines, and applications in an ubiquitous manner through the mobile infrastructure. In achieving these expectations, operators and carriers are planning to improve the user experience and the overall network performance. However, the efficient and satisfactory operation of all these densely-deployed networks hinges on a suitable backhaul and fronthaul provisioning. The research community is working against an extremely tight timeline to provide innovative technologies with extensive performance evaluation metrics along with the required standardization milestones, hardware, and components for a fully deployed network by 2020 and beyond. Access, Fronthaul and Backhaul Networks for 5G & Beyond provides an overview from both academic and industrial stakeholders of innovative backhaul/fronthaul solutions, covering a wide spectrum of underlying themes ranging from the recent thrust in edge caching for backhaul relaxation to mmWave based fronthauling for radio access networks. With 20 chapters from leading international researchers in the field, this book is essential reading for engineers, researchers, designers, architects, technicians, students, and service providers in the field of networking and mobile, wireless, and computing technologies working towards the deployment of 5G networks.