Contact UsAs NEC and NEC Laboratories Europe step onto the global stage at Mobile World Congress 2026 (MWC 2026), we continue to demonstrate leadership in shaping the future of cellular networking. NEC is at the forefront of breakthroughs in vRAN optimization, non-terrestrial networks, AI-driven automation and next generation RAN intelligence.
With deep research expertise and strong industry collaboration, NEC remains committed to advancing open, efficient and future-ready network architectures that empower operators and accelerates the shift toward fully programmable, AI-native connectivity.
To reinforce NEC’s presence at MWC 26, as both a thought leader and a key contributor to the advancement of cellular technologies, we are sharing insights into the most significant challenges and opportunities shaping today’s mobile networks. While we continue pioneering 6G, we also drive innovation in 5G to overcome the obstacles limiting its full potential. This reflects our ongoing commitment to guiding the industry toward more open, intelligent and future‑ready connectivity.
5G today and tomorrow: current challenges and future opportunities
5G has rapidly become the backbone of modern digital transformation, enabling unprecedented connectivity, ultra-low latency and pervasive mobility. Yet, as the ecosystem expands, so too does the complexity of deploying, scaling and sustaining 5G networks at global scale.
Across research and industry, several common themes have emerged: 5G offers immense opportunity but its expansion is constrained by technical, architectural, operational and economic challenges. At the same time, breakthroughs – from virtualization and non-terrestrial networks to machine learning and even quantum computing – are reshaping the network landscape and enabling the next evolution of wireless communications.
The infrastructure challenge: building dense, efficient 5G networks
Unlike previous generations, 5G requires a dense and highly distributed network architecture. The use of high frequency spectrum bands and the massive surge in device connectivity place unprecedented demands on infrastructure. While we are making progress, challenges still exist including:
- The dense deployment of small cells
- Managing high bandwidth fiber backhaul
- Implementing massive MIMO and advanced antenna systems
- Delivering more efficient energy consumption in vRAN and O‑RAN compute platforms
Deploying thousands of small cells requires suitable sites, access to power and reliable backhaul, which can be difficult to secure quickly. Urban environments add regulatory hurdles and physical constraints, while rural areas often lack the economic justification for extensive build‑outs.
At the same time, 5G’s technical demands put heavy pressure on compute resources. Massive MIMO, high-band operation and real-time processing require fast and predictable performance, yet virtualized environments introduce latency jitter and noisy neighbor effects. GPUs can help with performance but consume large amounts of energy, while CPUs struggle to meet strict timing deadlines. These constraints show that delivering 5G at scale requires new approaches to infrastructure planning, energy efficiency and compute orchestration.
The virtualization shift: opportunities and growing pains in vRAN and O‑RAN
Virtualization sits at the heart of the 5G evolution. O-RAN disaggregates hardware and software, encouraging interoperability and innovation. Meanwhile, vRAN replaces dedicated hardware with cloud-native, software-driven baseband processing.
While innovations in vRAN and O‑RAN are creating meaningful opportunities to improve flexibility, efficiency and scalability across modern mobile networks, there are still hurdles to overcome including:
- Compute unpredictability created by noisy neighbor effects
- High energy overhead from hardware accelerators
- Cache and memory contention in multi‑tenant environments
- Limited real-time control due to slow control loops
The shift toward vRAN and O-RAN introduces several obstacles that complicate 5G deployment. Virtualizing baseband functions onto general-purpose hardware creates unpredictable performance due to noisy-neighbor effects, cache contention and fluctuating compute loads. These issues make it difficult to consistently meet strict millisecond-level deadlines required for 5G PHY processing.
Hardware accelerators like GPUs can deliver needed performance but consume significantly more power, increasing operational costs. Multitenant environments introduce additional variability in memory and compute availability, causing latency spikes and reduced throughput. O-RAN’s distributed control architecture also relies on relatively slow control loops, limiting real-time adaptability. Together, these factors highlight the growing pains of transitioning from tightly-coupled, hardware-centric RANs to open, cloud-native architectures.
NEC is at the forefront of resolving these issues by deploying intelligent resource allocation frameworks like CloudRIC, improving and cache-aware energy optimization and introducing multi-timescale radio orchestration models like NEC’s MAREA.
Intelligent resource allocation frameworks like CloudRIC demonstrate how pooled heterogeneous compute can significantly cut energy consumption while meeting strict reliability requirements.
Meanwhile, multi-timescale orchestration models like MAREA provide more responsive and adaptive control of radio resources, improving the performance of latency-sensitive services and enhancing overall network resilience. Together, these advances show how cloud-native, software-driven RAN architectures can ultimately surpass traditional hardware-centric designs in both agility and energy efficiency.
Improving energy efficiency in O-RAN architecture
Kairos brings a fundamentally new approach to energy optimization in the O-RAN architecture. Developed by NEC Laboratories Europe, Kairos maximizes the energy-saving potential of O-RAN Advanced Sleep Modes (ASMs) while ensuring strict QoS compliance. ASMs allow Radio Units (RUs) – key building blocks of 5G base stations – to deactivate components such as power amplifiers, baseband cores and RF converters during short idle periods. This provides a significant energy-saving opportunity, given that RUs account for up to 90% of a 5G base station’s total power consumption and remain idle more than half the time at millisecond granularity.
Spectrum constraints: making the most of limited high-frequency spectrum
Spectrum scarcity remains one of the most pressing constraints in 5G deployments. High-frequency bands offer exceptional speed and capacity but introduce propagation challenges and competition across industries. Advanced technologies – massive MIMO, beamforming and dynamic spectrum sharing – help mitigate these constraints.
Non-Terrestrial Networks: extending 5G beyond the ground
Expanding 5G into the skies through non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) creates powerful opportunities to deliver connectivity where terrestrial infrastructure cannot reach. Satellites and high-altitude platforms enable truly global coverage, ensuring reliable service for remote communities, maritime vessels, aircraft and transportation corridors that have historically faced connectivity gaps.
When combined with terrestrial 5G through hybrid multi-connectivity, NTNs open the door to seamless mobility, consistent service quality and new commercial models built on ubiquitous, always-available coverage.
However, operating 5G services through NTNs introduces several technical challenges that stem from the unique characteristics of satellite and airborne platforms. High propagation delays, particularly in GEO and MEO satellites, make it difficult to support latency-sensitive applications and require careful optimization of signaling and scheduling.
LEO satellites reduce delays but introduce rapid Doppler shifts and frequent handovers due to their movement, increasing network complexity. Limited onboard processing power and constrained spectrum also restrict throughput and place pressure on compression, scheduling and resource allocation strategies.
NEC and NEC laboratories are working to resolve these challenges by designing smarter network protocols, providing more adaptive link management and better cross-layer optimization. Perceptual-aware compression techniques offer new ways to deliver rich data efficiently over bandwidth-constrained channels by prioritizing information that is most meaningful to end applications.
The semantic-guided framework, SPIFF, advances this further by interpreting the underlying content of transmissions, allowing networks to compress data intelligently while preserving essential semantics. Developed by NEC, Politecnico di Torino and CNIT, SPIFF reduces load, improves robustness and enhances performance in even the most limited spectrum conditions.
Innovations like these are particularly valuable in Non-Terrestrial Networks, where bandwidth availability is inherently limited. This will help ensure NTNs can operate as an effective extension of terrestrial 5G systems.
Security risks: new vulnerabilities in a more complex network
As 5G networks become more software-defined, distributed, and interconnected, the security landscape grows significantly more complex. Supply-chain vulnerabilities are amplified by the multivendor nature of O-RAN ecosystems, where compromises in hardware, firmware or third-party components can spread across the network.
Mitigating these risks requires not only stronger encryption and authentication, but also real-time anomaly detection, rigorous supply-chain verification, slice-aware security policies, and zero-trust models designed for highly dynamic, cloud-centric networks.
Economic and operational barriers
Rolling out 5G at scale introduces economic and operational pressures that many operators struggle to manage. The sheer cost of network densification – spanning site acquisition, power provisioning, fiber backhaul and equipment upgrades – places a heavy burden on capital budgets, especially in markets with slow ROI.
Introducing efficient AI-based virtual and open RAN technology is one way that NEC is helping resolve these issues for network carriers.
Opportunities: the transformative potential of 5G
5G enables a new wave of digital transformation, unlocking faster services, smarter automation and more immersive applications across industries. Its most powerful opportunities emerge where connectivity meets intelligence.
Edge computing integration pushes processing closer to users and machines, reducing latency and enabling real-time decision-making for autonomous systems, industrial automation, and responsive public services.
AI-driven network operations make 5G networks more adaptive and efficient by predicting demand, optimizing resources and resolving issues autonomously. Combined with enhanced broadband, massive IoT, and ultrareliable low-latency communication, these capabilities position 5G as a foundation for highly responsive, intelligent digital ecosystems.
Looking ahead: quantum-accelerated and AI-native 6G
One of the most promising frontiers is the exploration of quantum computing for wireless processing. Early research by NEC suggests that quantum-based LDPC decoding can outperform classical methods, though practical hardware is still emerging.
Conclusion
NEC and NEC laboratories are helping the industry overcome the technical, economic, and operational challenges that continue to shape 5G deployment. Through advances in virtualization, AI-driven automation, non-terrestrial networking and emerging quantum technologies, we are driving the shift toward more open, intelligent, and energy-efficient network architectures.