Mobile networks, in the near future, will face several technical challenges due to the ever-increasing service requirements both from the ISP point of view (such as operational optimizations, i.e., cost and energy efficiency) and the users perspective (such as throughput, reliability, availability, latency). This increment of network demands derives from the simultaneous increase of mobile terminals, the increasing diversity of requested services and the rapid evolution of new application scenarios, which range from the usual telecommunications sector to vertical industries, including smart factories, autonomous driving, the health sector and so on. In particular, all these application areas has been grouped in four categories by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), as follows:
- Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), requiring very high data traffic and bit rate
- Critical communications (CriC), for low latency, high density dis- tribution and ultra-high reliability communications
- Massive Internet of Things (mIoT), characterized by large num- bers of connected users in high user-density environments
- Vehicle-to-X (V2X) communications, requiring low latency, high speed and reliability, and position accuracy.