VCell: Going Beyond the Cell Abstraction in 5G Mobile Networks

Past years have witnessed the surge of mobile broadband Internet traffic due to the broad adoption of a number of major technical advances in new wireless technologies and consumer electronics. In this respect, mobile networks have greatly increased their availability to meet the exponentially growing capacity demand of modern mobile applications and services. The upcoming scenario in the near future lays down the possibility of a continuum of communications thanks also to the deployment of so called small cells. Conventional cellular networks and the small cells will form the foundation of this pervasive communication system. Therefore, future wireless systems must carry the necessary scalability and seamless operation to accommodate the users and integrate the macro cells and small cells together. In this work we propose the V-Cell concept and architecture. V-Cell is potentially leading to a paradigm shift when approaching the system designs that allows to overcome most of the limitations of physical layer techniques in conventional wireless networks.