5G System Design

7Transport Network Architecture

Anna Tzanakaki¹, Markos Anastasopoulos², Nathan Gomes³, Philippos Assimakopoulos³, Josep M. Fàbrega⁴, Michela Svaluto Moreolo⁴, Laia Nadal⁴, Jesús Gutiérrez⁵, Vladica Sark⁵, Eckhard Grass⁵, Daniel Camps‐Mur⁶, Antonio Oliva⁷, Nuria Molner⁸, Xavier Costa Perez⁹, Josep Mangues³, Ali Yaver¹⁰, Paris Flegkas¹¹, Nikos Makris¹¹, Thanasis Korakis¹¹ and Dimitra Simeonidou²

¹ National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and University of Bristol, UK

² University of Bristol, UK

³ University of Kent, UK

⁴ CTTC/CERCA, Spain

⁵ IHP, Germany

⁶ i2CAT, Spain

⁷ Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

⁸ IMDEA Networks Institute, Spain, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

⁹ NEC, Germany

¹⁰ Nokia, Poland

¹¹ University of Thessaly, Greece

7.1 Introduction

The explosive growth of the mobile Internet, and the increasing diversity of use cases that are enabled by this, force network providers to concurrently support a large variety of applications and services. This introduces the need to transform traditionally closed, static and inelastic network infrastructures into open, scalable and elastic ecosystems. At the same time, new and emerging services impose enormous capacity requirements that significantly exceed the currently installed capacity. Furthermore, tens of billions of end devices will require connectivity in a scalable and sustainable manner. To address these needs, a more efficient utilization of the radio frequency spectrum is necessary. In view of this, ...