Evolution of Mobile Networks and C-RAN on the Road Beyond 5G

Mobile communications has contributed to economic and social development on an unprecedented scale. In the world there will be soon 6 billion unique mobile subscribers. At the same time new services are created for not only human but also machine to machine interaction. To support these new services mobile networks are constantly evolving. We review the evolution of mobile networks from hardware, software and architectural perspective. We identify current technology problems in this evolution related to the core and radio access network and attempt to identify the road beyond.