Multiband Cooperation for 5G HetNets: A Promising Network Paradigm

Multiband cooperative networking is being recognized as a new enabling scheme to provide superior user experience and greatly scale up system capacity for 5G cellular networks. This article presents a control/user plane split (CUPS)-based multiband cooperative network architecture. To satisfy the diversified requirements of future 5G applications, the separation of the control and user planes is applied in both the core network and radio access network (RAN). In this proposed network architecture, control information is transmitted through the control plane at sub-6 GHz, and the user equipment (UE) data are forwarded through the user plane in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) bands.