Virtualized 5G Air Interface Protocol Stack for Multi-Cell Coordination

This article proposes a novel virtualized air interface protocol stack for next-generation wireless networks, that natively supports multiple radio access technologies and multi-point transmissions. Leveraging upon the concepts of softwarization of the air interface and virtualization, this design provides flexibility and scalability towards future advances in the radio access, whilst at the same time being backwards compatible with legacy technologies. This proposal enables the aggregation of multiple frequency bands and multiple technologies, without the need of modifying the operating procedures or the protocol of each supported technology. In the end, some challenges that have still to be addressed in future works are provided.