  LTE and LTE-Advanced have been optimized to deliver high bandwidth pipes to
wireless users. The transport mechanisms have been tailored to maximize single
cell performance by enforcing strict synchronism and orthogonality within a
single cell and within a single contiguous frequency band. Various emerging
trends reveal major shortcomings of those design criteria: 1) The fraction of
machine-type-communications (MTC) is growing fast. Transmissions of this kind
are suffering from the bulky procedures necessary to ensure strict synchronism.
2) Collaborative schemes have been introduced to boost capacity and coverage
(CoMP), and wireless networks are becoming more and more heterogeneous
following the non-uniform distribution of users. Tremendous efforts must be
spent to collect the gains and to manage such systems under the premise of
strict synchronism and orthogonality. 3) The advent of the Digital Agenda and
the introduction of carrier aggregation are forcing the transmission systems to
deal with fragmented spectrum. 5GNOW is an European research project supported
by the European Commission within FP7 ICT Call 8. It will question the design
targets of LTE and LTE-Advanced having these shortcomings in mind and the
obedience to strict synchronism and orthogonality will be challenged. It will
develop new PHY and MAC layer concepts being better suited to meet the upcoming
needs with respect to service variety and heterogeneous transmission setups.
Wireless transmission networks following the outcomes of 5GNOW will be better
suited to meet the manifoldness of services, device classes and transmission
setups present in envisioned future scenarios like smart cities. The
integration of systems relying heavily on MTC into the communication network
will be eased. The per-user experience will be more uniform and satisfying. To
ensure this 5GNOW will contribute to upcoming 5G standardization.
