In 5G and beyond 5G networks, the new cell-less radio access network architecture is adopted to overcome the extreme network capacity challenges generated by massive wireless devices used for diverse scenarios and various applications. At the same time, the evolution of mobile communications faces the important challenge of increased network power consumption. To fulfill user demands for various user densities and meanwhile reduce the power consumption, we present a novel energy-efficiency enhancement scheme, i.e., (3 × E) to increase the transmission rate per energy unit, with stable performance within the cell-less radio access network (RAN) architecture. Our proposed (3 × E) scheme activates two-step sleep modes (i.e., certain phase and conditional phase) through the intelligent interference management for temporarily switching access points (APs) to sleep, optimizing the network energy efficiency (EE) in highly loaded scenarios, as well as in scenarios with lower load. An intelligent control over underutilized/unused APs is considered, taking their interference contribution into account as the primary main criteria in addition to load-based conditional criteria. Therefore, our proposed scheme assures a stable performance enhancement and maintains an efficient power saving when the number of UEs increases, improving existing works not addressing this performance stability in peak-traffic hours. Simulation results show that the network EE is improved up to 30% compared to the reference algorithm and up to 60% with respect to the baseline algorithm in which all APs are active all the time.INDEX TERMS Cell-less, radio access network, sleep mode approach, energy-efficient, 5G and beyond.

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Existing mobile communication systems are unable to support ultra high system capacity and high reliability for the edge users of future 6G systems, which are envisioned to guarantee the desired quality of experience. Recently, cell-less radio access networks (RAN) are exploited to boost the system capacity. Therefore, in this letter we propose a cell-less networking approach with an efficient radio resource optimization mechanism to improve the system capacity of the future 6G networks. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed cell-less NG-RAN design provides significant system capacity improvement over the legacy cellular solutions.

We address the latency challenges in a high-density and high-load scenario for an ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) network which may coexist with enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services in the evolving wireless communication networks. We propose a new radio resource management (RRM) scheme consisting of a combination of time domain (TD) and frequency domain (FD) schedulers specific for URLLC and eMBB users. We also develop a user ranking algorithm from a radio unit (RU) perspective, which is employed by the TD scheduler to increase the efficiency of scheduling in terms of resource consumption in large-scale networks. Therefore, the optimized and novel resource scheduling scheme reduces latency for the URLLC users (requesting a URLLC service) in an efficient resource utilization manner to support scenarios with high user density. At the same time, this RRM scheme, while minimizing the latency, it also overcomes another important challenge of eMBB users (requesting an eMBB service), namely the throughput of those who coexist in such highly loaded scenario with URLLC users. The effectiveness of our proposed scheme including time and frequency domain (TD and FD) schedulers is analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the latency of URLLC users and throughput of the eMBB users compared to the baseline scheme. The proposed scheme has a 29% latency improvement for URLLC and 90% signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) improvement for eMBB users as compared with conventional scheduling policies. INDEX TERMSCell-less, Radio access network, URLLC, RRM, 5G and beyond networks. Recently, a new radio access network (RAN) architecture known as cell-less (or cell-free) [4], [5] is proposed to provide high spectral efficiency, flexible and cost-efficient deployment, ensure high quality of service and benefit from low path loss propagation conditions. In the cell-less architecture, the cell boundaries are removed from the user equipment (UE) view point. In most of the recent literature illustrating the advantages of cell-less massive multiple-input-multipleoutput (mMIMO) over legacy architectures, the relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) for eMBB service type are VOLUME xx, 2022

Many of the new mobile communication devices will be things that power and monitor our homes, city infrastructure and transport. Controlling drones thousands of miles away, performing remote surgeries or being immersed in video with no latency will also be a huge game changer. Those are some of the few things that make the fifth generation (5G) a revolution expected to be a thrust to the economy. To that end, the design and density of deployment of new networks is also changing becoming more dense, what introduces new challenges into play. What else will it add to previous generations? The MOOC about Ultra-dense networks for 5G and its evolution has been prepared by the researchers of an European MSCA ITN, named TeamUp5G, and introduces the most important technologies that support 5G mobile communications, with an emphasis on increasing capacity and reducing power. The content spans from aspects of communication technologies to use cases, prototyping and the future ahead, not forgetting issues like interference management, energy efficiency or spectrum management. The aim of the MOOC is to fill the gap in graduation and post-graduation learning on content related to emerging 5G technologies and its applications, including the future 6G. The target audience involves engineers, researchers, practitioners and students. This paper describes the content and the learning outcomes of the MOOC, the main tasks and resources involved in its creation, the joint contributions from the academic and non-academic sector, and aspects like copyright compliance, quality assurance, testing and details on communication and enrollment, followed by the discussion of the lessons learned.