Software-Defined Hyper-Cellular Architecture for Green and Elastic Wireless Access

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel software-defined hyper-cellular architecture (SDHCA) for wireless networks that enhances energy efficiency and elasticity by integrating control-traffic decoupling, cloud RANs, and software-defined principles.

Contribution

It introduces the SDHCA framework, combining multiple emerging RAN trends to enable greener and more adaptable wireless access, supported by a hardware testbed.

Findings

SDHCA effectively separates control and traffic planes.

Testbed demonstrates energy savings and flexibility.

Framework supports scalable and elastic wireless services.

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.