Researchers are now close to finding how software-defined cellular networking might be used to give smartphone users the next generation of super-superfast broadband - 5G.
A collaboration between NEC Electronics Samsung and several academic centres in China and Iran have assessed the latest developments aimed at 5G systems.
They have proposed their own novel end-to-end (E2E) software-defined cellular network (SDCN) architecture which, they say, offers flexibility, scalability, agility and efficiency.
Moreover, it will be sustainable for providers as well as profitable.
The team is currently building a demonstration system that will allow them to utilise several promising technologies in their architecture for 5G including cloud computing, network virtualisation, network functions virtualisation and dynamic service chaining.
"The approach could overcome bandwidth shortage problems, improve quality of service so avoiding delays and data loss, as well as reducing the vast number of error-prone network nodes needed for such a system," explained Ming Lei of Samsung Research and Development Institute China.
As yet, there is no single standard for 5G although various systems are being touted based on rebuilding the cellular networks to be super-efficient and exploiting different frequencies with their capacity for greater data rates.
The hope is to be able to achieve download speeds of perhaps 10 Gbits/second.
Ming Lei is working with Lei Jiang of NEC Laboratories in Beijing and colleagues at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, Beijing Jiaotong University and the University of Kurdistan.
The paper was published in the International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems.