This demonstration proposal shows the benefit of connected cars over autonomous cars or cars controlled by street signs. The demo comprises six miniature cars that can be controlled over a wireless network while they are driving on a street with an intersection. The audience can always interact with the cars by stopping them at any place of the track and watch the system react to prevent any potential collision. The cars are controlled by a mobile edge cloud that is placed in an emulated network by Nokia. By using an Xbox Kinect, ultrasonic, and infrared sensors in the cars to emulate GPS and radar functionalities of a real car, this setup accurately mimics the ecosystem of a futuristic connected traffic scenario.

The articles in this special section focus on 5G mobile communication, its network architecture, and technologies that support these services.

This paper proposes a conceptually novel, adaptive and future-proof 5G mobile network architecture. The proposed architecture enables unprecedented levels of network customisability, ensuring stringent performance, security, cost and energy requirements to be met; as well as providing an API-driven architectural openness, fuelling economic growth through over-the-top innovation. Not following the 'one system fits all services' paradigm of current architectures, the architecture allows for adapting the mechanisms executed for a given service to the specific service requirements, resulting in a novel service- and context-dependent adaptation of network functions paradigm. The technical approach is based on the innovative concept of adaptive (de)composition and allocation of mobile network functions, which flexibly decomposes the mobile network functions and places the resulting functions in the most appropriate location. By doing so, access and core functions no longer (necessarily) reside in different locations, which is exploited to jointly optimize their operation when possible. The adaptability of the architecture is further strengthened by the innovative software-defined mobile network control and mobile multi-tenancy concepts.

Relay node cell area is limited by low transmission power and limited antenna capabilities, which may not allow it to carry a significant share of the traffic load, thus reducing its efficiency. Cell range extension is thus expected to better balance the load in the network, hence, improving the performance of relay deployments. Herein, we investigate two relay cell range extension techniques, introducing a bias to cell selection and handover thresholds along with reduction in donor enhanced Node B transmission power. The study focuses on inband half-duplex relaying where resource partitioning among the two relay hops is jointly considered with cell range extension. As opposed to picocell deployments, extending the relay cell range offloads only partially the macrocell as newly admitted users increase the resource demand of the relay on its wireless backhaul link from its donor enhanced Node B. Hence, joint optimization of the decisive parameters for different key performance metrics is performed. Comprehensive analysis was carried out for both the downlink and the uplink in urban and suburban scenarios within the LTE- Advanced framework. Results reveal that the investigated solution yields significant gains. Finally, we discuss on the realization of cell range extension as part of network planning and offline optimization.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We will outline and summarize some of the more disruptive ideas around 5G designs which surface in recent months. Notably, we will discuss possible fundamental changes related to technology, standards and business models. We will discuss the impact of these developments onto the current research and innovation ecosystem.