Network Architecture and Essential Features for 5G: The SESAME Project Approach

The outstanding and continuous growth of the request of mobile broadband Internet access is creating the unprecedented need to rethink most of the design paradigms of the mobile network. Such trend is accompanied by remarkable progresses of miniaturised electronics, together with the proliferation of social services and computation intensive applications such as high definition video. On one hand, the current mobile network is unable to deliver sufficiently high data rates per user in order to support this growth, and a possible solution is provided by the dense deployment of small cell devices. On the other, mobile operators are struggling to lower costs of deployment and maintenance while keeping profitable revenues. This paper aims to provide overview of the solution developed by the 5G-PPP SESAME project. SESAME proposes to leverage on the concept of Small Cell-as-a-service (SCaaS), providing the complete architectural solution to deploy cloud-enabled small cells. The key innovations developed by SESAME include the deployment of computation capabilities at the mobile network edge, and to exploit virtualisation techniques to manage and orchestrate dense small cell scenarios and different use cases.