s the fourth-generation (4G) wireless communica- tions and networks are becoming more and more mature and widely implemented in the mobile wireless industrial and commercial products, the fifth-generation (5G) mobile wireless communication tech- nologies are rapidly emerging in research fields. The emerging 5G wireless networks aims at ensuring that various contempo- rary wireless applications can be timely and satisfactorily served at any time and any place, and in any way [1–3]. One of the most important services in 5G wireless applications is the bandwidth-intentive and time-sensitive multimedia, even including 3D immersive media, transmissions that were previ- ously confined to wired networks such as the Internet, but are now making forays into mobile devices and wireless networks. Video traffic constitutes a significant 51 percent of the mobile traffic volume and is expected to increase to 67 percent by 2017 [4, 5]. Full high definition (FHD) video is also being increasingly shared through popular media such as YouTube, and ultra high definition (UHD) and 3D video content will eventually take over in the not so distant future. To support these highly bandwidth-intentive and time-sen- sitive multimedia services for the emerging 5G wireless net- works, for the last several years the telecommunications academia and industry have made a great deal of effort/pro- cesses in investigating various advanced wireless techniques such as device-to-device (D2D) communications [6], wireless full-duplex (FD) communications [7, 8], advanced cognitive radio (CR) communications [8], and so on, as well as quality of service (QoS) provisioning techniques. The key design issue for multimedia wireless services is how to efficiently guarantee timely multimedia data transmissions within specified delay bounds. Because of the highly varying wireless channels, the deterministic delay-bounded QoS requirements for high-vol- ume multimedia wireless traffic are usually hard to guarantee. Alternatively, the statistical delay-boundeded QoS provision- A 46 IEEE Network • November/December 2014 Abstract As a critical step towards the next new era of mobile wireless networks, recently 5G mobile wireless networks have received significant research attention and efforts from both academia and industry. The 5G mobile wireless networks are expected to provide different delay-bounded QoS guarantees for a wide spectrum of services, applications, and users with extremely diverse requirements. Since the time-sensitive services in 5G multimedia wireless networks may vary dramatically in both a large range from milliseconds to a few seconds and diversity from uni- form/constant delay-bound to different/variable delay-bound guarantees among different wireless links, the delay-bound QoS requirements for different types of ser- vices promote the newly emerging heterogeneous statistical delay-bounded QoS provisioning over 5G mobile wireless networks, which, however, imposes many new challenging issues not encountered before in 4G wireless networks. To over- come these new challenges, in this article we propose a novel heterogeneous sta- tistical QoS provisioning architecture for 5G mobile wireless networks. First, we develop and analyze the new heterogeneous statistical QoS system model by applying and extending the effective capacity theory. Then, through the wireless coupling channels, we apply our proposed heterogeneous statistical QoS architec- ture to efficiently implement the following powerful 5G-candidate wireless tech- niques: 1) device-to-device networks; 2) full-duplex networks; and 3) cognitive radio networks, respectively, for providing heterogeneous statistical delay-bounded QoS guarantees. Finally, using the simulation experiments we show that our pro- posed architecture and schemes significantly outperform the existing traditional sta- tistical delay-bounded QoS provisioning schemes in terms of satisfying the heterogeneous delay-bounded QoS requirements while maximizing the aggregate system throughput over 5G mobile wireless networks. Heterogeneous Statistical QoS Provisioning Over 5G Mobile Wireless Networks Xi Zhang, Wenchi Cheng, and Hailin Zhang A 0890-8044/14/$25.00 © 2014 IEEE Xi Zhang is with Texas A&M University. Wenchi Cheng and Hailin Zhang are with Xidian University. This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Founda- tion under Grants ECCS-1408601 and CNS-1205726, the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award under Grant ECCS-0348694, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61401330 & No. 61371127 & No. 62993610), the 111 Project of China (B08038), the Important National Science and Technology Specific Projects (2012ZX03003012), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 72136037 & No. 7214603701), and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-12-0918).