CelEc framework for reconfigurable small cells as part of 5G ultra-dense networks

Abstract

This paper proposes the Cella Ecosystem (CelEc) concept for emerging 5G ultra dense Networks, to evolve and supplement the Mobile Radio Network by using the crowd's User Equipments (UEs), densely distributed in our physical world and environment, as an integral part of the Infrastructure. Towards this end, CelEc establishes a decentralized ecosystem (the CelEc Tier) of numerous, unbound and ubiquitous networking and computing elements offering their networking functionalities and computing and storage resources to bridge coverage gaps, supplement capacity, increase data rates, and boost computing, whenever the Network is stressed. This is in the same spirit as the introduction of smaller sized cells throughout the evolution of mobile telephony, to maximize spectrum resource efficiency. Specifically CelEc, by enhancing the UEs with eNodeB's functionalities and additional networking operation functions, realises the smallest, portable, and reconfigurable cells (i.e., the Cella cells) allowing for dynamic massive deployment, and enables the efficient flows of data, whenever and wherever needed. As such CelEc provides for a dynamic reconfiguration of the Mobile Network infrastructure, in an effortless, costless (in terms of CAPEX) and flexible manner, hence removing the restrains of existing Small Cells beyond their static positioning. A preliminary evaluation of some of the ideas discussed in this paper for CelEc, showed among others, scalable massive mobile support, and significant improvements on the overall capacity, data rates, energy and spectral efficiency, as envisioned for 5G. © 2017 IEEE.