There are three pillars that characterize the new 5G revolution, namely, the use of heterogeneous wireless access technologies conforming an ultra-dense network, the software-driven flexibility of this network, and the simplified and user-centric operation and management of the system. This next-generation network operation and management shall be based on the usage of Big Data Analytics techniques to monitor the end-user quality of experience through direct measures of the network. This paper describes the Astellia approach towards this network revolution and presents some results on the performance of quality estimation techniques in current cellular networks. Thanks to the use of this approach, operators may fill the gap of knowledge between network key performance indicators and user experience. This way, they can operate in a proactive manner and have actual measurements of the users' experience, which leads to a fairer judgement of the users' complaints.

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This paper investigates the use of non-coherent communication techniques for open-loop transmission over temporally-correlated Rayleigh-fading MIMO channels. These techniques perform data detection without knowing the instantaneous channel coefficients. Three non-coherent Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) schemes, namely, differential unitary space-time modulation, differential spacetime block code, and Grassmannian signaling, are compared with several state-of-the-art training-based coherent schemes. This paper shows that the non-coherent schemes are meaningful alternatives to trainingbased communication, specially as the number of transmit antennas increases. In particular, for more than two transmit antennas, non-coherent communication provides a clear advantage in medium to high mobility scenarios.INDEX TERMS Non-coherent communications, Grassmannian signaling, differential unitary space time modulation, differential space-time block code, MIMO, temporal correlation.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the new standardproposed by the 3GPP to evolve towards 4G. Evolved UTRAN (E-UTRAN) specifications are currently completed and research groups are studying the performance of the last Release 8. Nevertheless, these studies lack a full modeling of the MAC layer because they either leave out retransmissions and turbo coding or assume ideal channel estimation. This paper uses an accurate LTE MAC layer simulator to perform a complete downlink LTE performance study. Results compare different channel estimation techniques showing significant difference among them, most of all regarding the robustness of the estimator against errors. Finally, LTE system performance assessment is presented employing a realistic channel estimator.

Abstract-In this paper, we consider the application of noncoherent Grassmannian signalling in practical multi-channelfrequency-flat multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems. In these systems, Grassmannian signalling, originally developed for single-channel block-fading systems, is not readily applicable. In particular, in such systems, the channel coefficients are constant across time and frequency, which implies that spectrally-efficient signalling ought to be jointly structured over these domains. To approach this goal, we develop a concatenation technique that yields a spectrally-efficient time-frequency Grassmannian signalling scheme, which enables the channel coherence bandwidth to be regarded as an additional coherence time. This scheme is shown to achieve the high signalto-noise ratio non-coherent capacity of MIMO channels when the fading coefficients are constant over a time-frequency block. This scheme is also applicable in fast fading systems with coherence bandwidth exceeding that of one subchannel. The proposed scheme is independent of the symbol duration, i.e., the channel use duration, and is thus compatible with the transmit filter designs in current systems.