RAN enablers for 5G radio resource management

This paper presents the description of several key RAN enablers for the radio resource management (RRM) framework of the fifth generation (5G) radio access network (RAN), referred to as building blocks of the 5G RRM. In particular, the following key RAN enablers are discussed: i) interference management techniques for dense and dynamic deployments, focusing on cell-edge performance enhancement; ii) dynamic traffic steering mechanisms that aim to attain the optimum mapping of 5G services to any available resources when and where needed by considering the peculiarities of different air interface variants (AIVs); iii) resource management strategies that deal with network slices; and iv) tight interworking between novel 5G AIVs and evolved legacy AIVs such as Long-term Evolution (LTE). Evaluation results for each of these key RAN enablers are also presented.