Overview

5G networks will soon be ubiquitous. These networks and the emerging ones are expected to support a wide range of applications, particularly, those based on the Internet of Things (IoTs) which have high performance, dependability and security requirements such as self-driving cars, remote surgery, smart grid, etc. To support such new services along with traditional services in large-scale mobile networks that are usually optimal in resource utilization and costs, they are expected to have novel architectures that are primarily flexible and programmable. Software defined networking (SDN) and virtual function virtualization (NFV) are two major and complementary technologies which help realize this important objective. Other enabling technologies for 5G networks that are forthcoming are fog and edge computing, blockchain, cashing and artificial intelligence. In this talk, we first consider 5G network architectures and then study other emerging enabling technologies for 5G networks.