A Comprehensive Survey of RAN Architectures Toward 5G Mobile Communication System

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile communication system aims to deliver a ubiquitous mobile service with enhanced quality of service (QoS). It is also expected to enable new use-cases for various vertical industrial applications—such as automobiles, public transportation, medical care, energy, public safety, agriculture, entertainment, manufacturing, and so on. Rapid increases are predicted to occur in user density, traffic volume, and data rate. This calls for novel solutions to the requirements of both mobile users and vertical industries in the next decade. Among various available options, one that appears attractive is to redesign the network architecture—more specifically, to reconstruct the radio access network (RAN). In this paper, we present an inclusive and comprehensive survey on various RAN architectures toward 5G, namely cloud-RAN, heterogeneous cloud-RAN, virtualized cloud-RAN, and fog-RAN. We compare them from various perspectives, such as energy consumption, operations expenditure, resource allocation, spectrum efficiency, system architecture, and network performance. Moreover, we review the key enabling technologies for 5G systems, such as multi-access edge computing, network function virtualization, software-defined networking, and network slicing; and some crucial radio access technologies (RATs), such as millimeter wave, massive multi-input multi-output, device-to-device communication, and massive machine-type communication. Last but not least, we discuss the major research challenges in 5G RAN and 5G RATs and identify several possible directions of future research.