5G: New Air Interface and

Radio Access Virtualization

HUAWEI WHITE PAPER April 2015

5G

New Air Interface and Radio Access

virtualization

Contents

1. Introduction ............................................................... 1
2. 5G Performance Requirements ................................... 2
3. 5G Spectrum .............................................................. 3
4. 5G Flexible New Air Interface ..................................... 4
5. Radio Access Virtualization ......................................... 7
6. Conclusions ................................................................ 8

5G

New Air Interface and Radio Access

virtualization

Introduction
5G is the next frontier of innovation for the wireless industry and the broader ICT ecosystem . It is common
consensus that 5G will focus on the breakthroughs to support the expansion and enhancement of mobile
internet and Internet of Things (IoT). The application of 5G in IoT and vertical industries will bring more
market space and present business opportunities to operators. In addition, expanded and enhanced
mobile internet services will help further improve the consumers experience, strengthen user stickiness
and guarantee operators' revenues and profits, as Figure 1 shows.

Enhance Mobile Internet

Empower IoT

Consumers

Operators

Universal consistent experience

Enable new applications

Verticals

Easy deployment and maintenance

Providing different services to
different industries
and different customers quickly and
efficiently

Easy access to the common infrastructure of 5G

Real-time, on-demand service

Figure 1: 5G will Carry Many Industries and Benefit Stakeholders.

To adequately support the development of mobile

broadband, ultra-low latency, massive connection

Internet and IoT, 5G networks will increasingly

and ultra-high reliability[1] etc., along with the

become the primary means of network access

ability to accommodate various use cases. The

for person-to-person and person-to-machine

strong requirement of a service oriented network

connectivity. This means that 5G will need to

to provide better user experience in a flexible,

match the diversity of service requirements and

efficient way is raised.

service characteristics. Examples include extreme

[1] Huawei Whitepaper, 5G: A Technology Vision, Nov. 2013. http://www.huawei.com/ilink/en/download/HW_314849

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New Air Interface and Radio Access

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5G

5G Performance Requirements
Wireless networks will need to match advances

of magnitude lower energy consumption than the

in fixed networking in terms of delivered quality

current generation of wireless network. Although

of service, reliability and security. It is expected

these performance targets do not need to be met

that the 5G system design will support three

simultaneously, they provide the basis for the Gbit/

orders of magnitude higher capacity per km2, a

s user experience for 5G networks. The improved

hundred times higher data rate, latency of less

performance targets of the overall 5G system are

than 1 ms across the radio access link, a hundred

shown in Figure 2.

times more connections (links) and three orders

Ultra
Capacity

Ultra High
Rate

x1000
(Capacity/km2)

x100
(10Gbps)

Ultra Low
Latency

Massive
Connectivity

<1ms

X100

Ultra Low
Energy
Consumption
X1000

Figure 2: 5G Performance Targets.

Based on the requirements, two major challenges should be addressed for the design of the 5G
system:
The 5G system should be capable of flexible and efficient use of all available spectrums from low
band to high band and licensed to unlicensed bands.
The 5G system should be adaptable to provide efficient support for the diverse set of service
characteristics, massive connectivity and massive capacity. Flexible network design is required to
improve spectral efficiency, increase connectivity and reduce latency.
The requirements and challenges will impact on the design of 5G air interface and the network
architecture. In this white paper, the flexible 5G new air interface is explored in details. The viewpoint
of network architecture is to be presented in subsequent white papers.
The 5G air interface framework is built upon two major concepts: software defined flexible air
interface and radio access virtualization. In terms of air interface, it should be optimized in the way to
support versatile application scenarios. In terms of radio access virtualization, it encompasses selforganization and coordination algorithms that utilize the features, protocols and interfaces to avoid the
limitations of the geographic cell construct.

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5G

New Air Interface and Radio Access

virtualization

5G Spectrum
The growing traffic demand necessitates increasing the amount of spectrum that may be utilised by the
5G systems. High frequency bands in the centimeter wave (cmWave) and millimeter wave (mmWave)
range will be adopted due to their potential for supporting wider channel bandwidths and the consequent
capability to deliver high data rates.
The new spectrum below 6GHz is expected to be allocated for mobile communication at the World Radio
Conference (WRC) 2015, and the band above 6GHz expected to be allocated at WRC 2019, as shown in
Figure 3.
WRC15
Requirement

Cellular
Bands

WRC19

45GHz available

>500MHz for IMT-2020

5G Primary bands

10

for future Cellular Access and Self-Backhaul

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

GHz

Visible
Light

5G Complementary Bands for Capacity, 45GHz available

Figure 3: 5G will Aggregate Sub 6GHz and the Bands above 6GHz.

5G network is a heterogeneous network which enables the

cooperation between lower-frequency wide-area coverage network
and high-frequency network. The consensus is higher frequency
bands are the complementary bands to 5G whereas low frequency
bands (<6GHz) are still the primary bands of 5G spectrum.
High frequency also enables unified access and backhaul since
the same radio resources is shared. It is expected to use a unified
air interface and a hierarchical scheduling for both radio access
and backhaul which enables flexible backhauling and low-cost
ultra dense networking (UDN).
Future radio access may also employ bands with different levels
of access regulation including exclusive licensed, non-exclusive
licensed and unlicensed bands. The 5G system treats both the
licensed and unlicensed spectrum in a flexible, unified air interface
framework.

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New Air Interface and Radio Access

virtualization

5G

5G Flexible New Air Interface

Different application requirements for air interface technology is complex and diverse, a unified new air
interface with flexibility and adaptability is proposed to meet these requirements. New air interface consists
of building blocks and configuration mechanisms such as adaptive waveform, adaptive protocols, adaptive
frame structure, adaptive coding and modulation family and adaptive multiple access schemes. With these
blocks and mechanisms, the air interface is able to accommodate the future wide variety of user services,
spectrum bands and traffic levels.
Key technology components, as shown in Figure

massive MIMO technology. The new air interface

4-1, include a new waveform technology Filtered-

design can effectively improve spectral efficiency,

OFDM (Filtered-Orthogonal Frequency Division

increase connectivity, and reduce latency, thus

Multiplexing), a new multiple access technology

facilitating the deployment of customized scenarios

SCMA (Sparse Code Multiple Access), a new

applied to the IoT and for high bandwidth-consuming

channel code Polar Code, the full-duplex mode and

scenarios such as virtual reality.

Massive MIMO
Full Duplex

Mobile
Internet

(Duplex Mode)
Improve Throughput
Universal Video
Ultra High Throughput

(Spatial Multiplexing)
Improve Throughput

Polar Code

(Channel Coding)
Improve Reliability

SCMA

F-OFDM

(Multiple Access)
Improve connections
Shorten Latency

(Flexible Waveform)
Adapt Different Services

Connected Car
Ultra Low Latency
& High Reliability

IoT Services
Massive
Connection

IoT

One air interface fits many applications with high flexibility, at least 3x spectrum efficiency improvement
Figure 4-1: New air interface components.
The new air interface exploits two-level non-orthogonality to maximize the spectrum efficiency, the number
of connected devices and to provide flexibility to support vastly diverse services. Filtered OFDM allows
inter-subband non-orthogonality while SCMA enables intra-subband non-orthogonality.

Filtered - OFDM
Filtered-OFDM is one element of fundamental waveform technology to support different waveforms,
multiple access schemes and frame structures based on the application scenarios and service
requirements simultaneously. It can facilitate the co-existence of different waveforms with different OFDM
parameters as shown in Figure 4-2. In this figure different sub-band filters are used to create OFDM subcarrier groupings with different inter-sub-carrier spacing,OFDM symbol durations and guard times. By
enabling multiple parameter configurations, filtered-OFDM is able to provide a more optimum parameter
choice for each service group and hence better overall system efficiency.

04

5G

New Air Interface and Radio Access

virtualization

Traditional Voice/data
traffic

Low latency video

High speed vehicle/train

Frequency

L

Time

Internet of Things

L

Figure 4-2: Filtered-OFDM enables flexible waveform parameters.

Sparse Code Multiple Access

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) [2] is

and the resulting constellation mapping is shown

another waveform configuration of the flexible

in Figure 4-3. A devices encoded bits are first

new air interface. This non-orthogonal waveform

mapped to a codeword from a codebook. In the

facilitates a new multiple access scheme in which

example, a codeword of length 4 is used. The low

sparse codewords of multiple layers of devices are

projection codebook has a reduced constellation

overlaid in code and power domains and carried

(from 4 points to 3 points). Furthermore, each point

over shared time-frequency resources. Typically,

(e.g. 00) has non-zero component only in one

the multiplexing of multiple devices may become

tone. A codebook with one non-zero component is

overloaded if the number of overlaid layers is more

a zero-PAPR codebook.

than the length of the multiplexed codewords.

Furthermore, a blind multi-device reception

However, with SCMA, overloading is tolerable

technique [4] can be applied to detect device

with moderate complexity of detection thanks to

activities and the information carried by them

the reduced size of the SCMA multi-dimensional

simultaneously. With such blind detection

constellation and the sparseness of SCMA

capability, grant-free multiple access [5] can

codewords. In SCMA, coded bits are directly

be supported. Grant-free multiple access is a

mapped to multi-dimensional sparse codewords

mechanism that eliminates the dynamic request

selected from layer-specific SCMA codebooks.

and grant signaling overhead. It is an attractive

The complexity of detection is controlled through

solution for small packets transmission. SCMA

two major factors. One is the sparseness level

is an enabler for grant-free multiple access. Due

of codewords, and the second is the use of multi-

to these benefits,SCMA can support massive

dimensional constellations with a low number of

connectivity, reduce transmission latency and

projection points per dimension [3]. An example of

provide energy saving.

device multiplexing with a low projection codebook

[2] H. Nikopour and H. Baligh, Sparse code multiple access IEEE 24th PIMRC, pp. 332 336, 2013.
[3] M. Taherzadeh, H. Nikopour, A. Bayesteh and H. Baligh, SCMA codebook design, IEEE VTC Fall 2014.
[4] A. Bayesteh, E. Yi, H. Nikopour and H. Baligh, Blind detection of SCMA for uplink grant-free multiple access, IEEE 11th ISWCS, pp. 853 857, 2014.
[5] K. Au, L. Zhang, H. Nikopour, E. Yi, A. Bayesteh, U. Vilaipornsawai, J. Ma and P. Zhu, Uplink contention based SCMA for 5G radio access, IEEE
Globecom Workshop on Emerging Technologies for 5G Wireless Cellular Network, pp. 900 905, 2014.

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New Air Interface and Radio Access

virtualization

5G

4-poingt Low-PAPR codebook

b11b12

FEC Encoder 1

b21b22

FEC Encoder 2

b31b32

FEC Encoder 3

b41b42

FEC Encoder 4

b51b52

FEC Encoder 5

b61b62

FEC Encoder 6

Non-zero compoennt-1

Non-zero compoennt-2

11

10

01
10

00

00
11

01

Non-zero Non-zero
tone-1
tone-2

SCMA Modulation Codebook Mapping

SCMA block 1

SCMA Modulation Codebook Mapping

SCMA block 2

UE1
UE2

SCMA Modulation Codebook Mapping

UE3
UE4

SCMA Modulation Codebook Mapping

UE5
UE6

SCMA Modulation Codebook Mapping

SCMA Modulation Codebook Mapping

Figure 4-3: SCMA multiplexing and low projection codebook constellation.

Polar Codes

Massive-MIMO

Polar codes are a major breakthrough in coding

Massive MIMO makes a clean break with current

theory. They can achieve Shannon capacity

practice through the use of large-scale antenna

with a simple encoder and a simple successive

systems over network and devices. As one of

cancellation (SC) decoder when the code block

the most promising ingredients of the emerging

size is large enough. Polar codes have brought

5G technology, massive MIMO is a commercially

significant interests and a lot of research work has

attractive solution since 100x higher efficiency

been done mainly on code design and decoding

is possible without installing 100x more base

algorithm. One of the most important decoding

stations.

algorithms is the SC-list decoding which can

The progress on omni-directional beam with low

perform as well as the optimal maximum-likelihood

power, low PAPR and flexible beam adjustment

(ML) decoding with a list size of 32 for moderate

for mobility UE tracking is enabling the theoretical

code block sizes. A lot of performance simulations

concept to commercial deployment reality in

show that Polar codes concatenated with cyclic

diverse scenarios, such as macro, micro, suburb

redundancy codes (CRC) and an adaptive SC-list

and high-rise.

decoder can outperform turbo/LDPC (Low Density

Parity Check) codes for short and moderate code

Full Duplex

block sizes. Polar code has better performance

F u l l - D u p l e x b r e a k s t h e b a r r i e r o f t o d a y s

than all the codes currently used in the 4G LTE

communications by supporting bi-directional

systems, especially for short code length, thus

communications without time or frequency duplex.

it is considered as a perfect candidate for the

By transmitting and receiving at the same time

FEC (Forward error correction) module in 5G air

and on the same frequency, Full-Duplex has the

interface design.

potential to double the system capacity and reduce

the system delay.

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5G

New Air Interface and Radio Access

virtualization

Radio Access Virtualization

5G networks using radio access virtualization strategies and advanced computational platforms will exploit
network densification. The virtual cell concept removes the traditional cell boundary for the device and
provides a consequent reduction of the detrimental cell-edge experience by the device.

Elimination of cell boundaries

Traditionally devices associate with a cell as a consequence the link performance may degrade as a
device moves away from the cell center. In a virtualized device centric network, the network determines
which access point(s) are to be associated with the device. The cell moves with and always surrounds the
device in order to provide a cell-center experience throughout the entire network. The elimination of the
devices view of the cell boundary is illustrated in Figure 5.
Cloud Processor

Paradigm Shift:
Cellular -> Non-cellular
UE follows NW

Cloud RAN

Reduced Coverage

Improved Coverage

NW follows UE

Figure 5: Elimination of cell boundaries.

Device-centric Access Point Optimization

Each device is served by its preferred set of access points.The actual serving set for a device may contain
one or multiple access points and the devices data is partially or fully available at some or a small set
of potential serving access points. The access point controller will accommodate each device with its
preferred set and transmission mode at every communication instance while considering load and Channel
State Information (CSI) knowledge associated with the access points.

Network-assisted device Cooperation

An important factor in determining and updating potential and actual serving access point sets is the
possibility of cooperation among neighboring devices and the nature of such cooperation. The density of
neighboring devices and the capability for device to device (D2D) connectivity provides the opportunity for
device cooperation in transmission/reception.
The access point controller can schedule the devices benefiting from the device cooperation and manage
factors such as cooperation collision, security and privacy restrictions, and cooperation incentive. A
network assisted device cooperation results in better virtualization by providing more possible transmission
paths from network to the target devices.
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New Air Interface and Radio Access

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5G

Conclusions
The future network will focus on the different
business applications and user experience other
than just the pursuit of the greater bandwidth and
volume. This will raise the requirement to build
service oriented networks to quickly and efficiently
respond to user needs, as well as to offer
consistent and high-quality services for different
use cases.
This paper has outlined an overview of Huaweis
5G air interface design including the key
concepts of air interface adaptation and radio
access virtualization. Radio access virtualization
technologies can provide the best transmit and
receive conditions to users while flexible new
air interface selects the best sets of air interface
technologies on the wireless links. These two
components together can bring the best user
experience in the 5G wireless network. The goal is
to design an air interface that is adaptable to the
diverse services, applications and devices of the
future, scalable to support massive connectivity
and massive capacity and intelligent to adapt to all
the locally available spectrum .

08

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