Software-Defined Hyper-Cellular Architecture for Green and Elastic Wireless Access
arXiv:1512.04935 · doi:10.1109/MCOM.2016.7378420
Abstract
To meet the surging demand of increasing mobile Internet traffic from diverse applications while maintaining moderate energy cost, the radio access network (RAN) of cellular systems needs to take a green path into the future, and the key lies in providing elastic service to dynamic traffic demands. To achieve this, it is time to rethink RAN architectures and expect breakthroughs. In this article, we review the state-of-art literature which aims to renovate RANs from the perspectives of control-traffic decoupled air interface, cloud-based RANs, and software-defined RANs. We then propose a software-defined hyper-cellular architecture (SDHCA) that identifies a feasible way of integrating the above three trends to enable green and elastic wireless access. We further present key enabling technologies to realize SDHCA, including separation of the air interface, green base station operations, and base station functions virtualization, followed by our hardware testbed for SDHCA. Besides, we summarize several future research issues worth investigating.
Accepted by IEEE Communications Magazine
References in corpus (4)
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- Redesigning Fronthaul for Next-Generation Networks: Beyond Baseband Samples and Point-to-Point Links
- HyCell: Enabling GREEN Base Station Operations in Software-Defined Radio Access Networks