Towards Enhanced Mobile Broadband Communications: A Tutorial on Enabling Technologies, Design Considerations, and Prospects of 5G and beyond Fixed Wireless Access Networks

Abstract

There has been a growing interconnection across the world owing to various multimedia applications and services. Fixed wireless access (FWA) is an attractive wireless solution for delivering multimedia services to different homes. With the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond mobile networks, the FWA performance can be enhanced significantly. However, their implementation will present different challenges on the transport network due to the incessant increase in the number of required cell-sites and the subsequent increase in the per-site requirements. This paper presents a comprehensive tutorial on the enabling technologies, design considerations, requirements, and prospects of broadband schemes. Furthermore, the related technical challenges of FWA are reviewed, and we proffer potential solutions to address them. Besides, we review various transport network options that can be employed for FWA deployment. In this regard, we offer an in-depth discussion on their related requirements for different use cases. Moreover, we give an insight into the 3GPP RAN functional split implementations and implications on the 5G FWA transport network solutions. The concepts of virtualized RANs for attending flexibly to the dynamic nature of different use cases are also presented.

Keywords

• 5G
• 6G
• beamforming
• enhanced mobile broadband
• radio access network
• fixed wireless access