Abstract: While small cell densification is a promising solution to tame increasing traffic demands, a systematic deployment of small cells is cost-inefficient and poses serious challenges in terms of backhaul and interference. In this tutorial, we provide a brief overview on SCNs while highlighting key challenges, associated techniques, and future landscape towards 5G. First, we delve into the details of advanced interference management techniques by introducing concepts such as cell range expansion (CRE), cell association, and intercell and interference coordination (ICIC) that lie at the heart of 5G networks. Then, we discuss in detail the concept of self-organizing networks (SONs) and its key role in self-configuring and self-optimizing small cell deployment. Here, we focus on novel game-theoretic and learning techniques that are seen as an enabler for deploying self- optimizing and self-configuring heterogeneous and small cell networks. In the second part of the tutorial, we will present an array of important topics such as cellular-WiFi integration (2015 COMSOC Fred Ellersick Prize), multi connectivity, dynamic TDD and decoupled uplink-downlink, full duplexing, co-primary operator spectrum sharing (CoPSS), backhaul-aware resource management, and context-aware edge caching (2016 COMSOC Best Tutorial Prize). The tutorial will conclude with a number of trending topics including connected vehicles (V2V/V2I), deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), edge/fog computing and other 5G-related topics. The objective of this tutorial is two-fold, first it will provide a good overview of the technical challenges and open problems of 5G, and second it will showcase a number of mathematical tools from which the audience will largely benefit.

Mehdi Bennis (Senior Member, IEEE) received his M.Sc. degree from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and the Eurecom Institute, France in 2002. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering December 2009 on spectrum sharing for future mobile cellular systems. His main research interests are in radio resource management, heterogeneous networks, game theory and machine learning. Dr. Bennis was the co-PI of the Broadband Evolved FEMTO (FP7-BeFEMTO) project, and is currently the PI of the European CELTIC project SHARING (2013-2016). He has published more than 100 research papers in international conferences, journals, book chapters and patents. Dr. Bennis is currently an editor for the IEEE Transaction of Wireless Communications. Dr. Bennis co-chaired a dozen of IEEE workshops including the four consecutive editions of the international workshop on small cell wireless networks (SmallNets) held in conjunction with IEEE ICC 2012-2015. Recently, Dr. Bennis gave tutorial presentations at IEEE PIMRC 2012, IEEE GLOBECOM 2012, IEEE DySPAN 2014, IEEE WCNC 2014 and IEEE GLOBECOM 2014, IEEE ICC 2015. Dr. Bennis has also given keynote speeches at IEEE ICT 2013, and IEEE WCNC 2014 CLEEN WS. Finally, Dr. Bennis was a guest editor on 4 special issues (forthcoming JSAC SI on Hetnets, IEEE Communication magazine on full duplexing, big data and UAVs). Dr. Bennis is the winner of the 2015 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize.