User-Centric Base-Station Wireless Access Virtualization for Future 5G Networks

This new concept breaks away from the conventional cell-centric architecture to provide boundary less communications in future fifth-generation (5G) networks. User-centric wireless access virtualization (WAV) allows each user to be served by a set of carefully selected transmission points (TP)s forming a user-specific virtual base station (uVBS) adapted to its environment and quality-of-service (QoS) requirement. 

As such, this paper proposes three innovative low-cost clustering approaches that enable user-centric WAV and provide dynamic, adaptive, and overlapping TP clusters while requiring not only negligible overhead cost, but also minimum signaling changes at both network and user sides. 

Simulations show that they may achieve until 154% and 282% of throughput and coverage gains, respectively. Furthermore, these approaches are flexible enough to be adapted to different network dimensions (i.e., space, time, etc.).