Small Cells Enabled by Crowdsourced Radio Units Mounted on Parked Vehicles for Smart City

Abstract

A large number of small cells are densely deployed in the era of 5G and beyond 5G mobile networks to achieve high rate and low latency data transmission. Small cells are composed with fixed ground radio units (RUs) in the conventional networks, and thus the utilization rate of them is drastically deteriorated due to the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile traffic demand. To address this problem, adaptive network architectures have been investigated to reconfigure networks on demand using small cells mounted on moving objects such as vehicles and drones. However, it has been difficult to establish stable communication link to ground nodes in high-speed environments with these schemes. Therefore, this paper proposes a concept of small cells composed with crowdsourced RUs mounted on parked vehicles. They are activated based on the traffic demand in surrounding area by road side units (RSUs) assuming a smart city. The proposed idea is based on the correlation between the distribution of people and the occupancy rate of parking lots. It can efficiently improve user throughput with relatively small number of RUs. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is validated through numerical analysis, computer simulations, and experimental results.

A Comprehensive Survey on Moving Networks

“…On the other hand, the throughput increased roughly from 200 Mbps (for static macro and small cell deployments) to a maximum of 700 Mbps with the installation of antennas on vehicles parked in office parking lots. Similarly, in [109], the authors found a strong correlation between cellular traffic demand and occupancy rate of neighboring parking lots similar to [108]. The authors proposed to install cells on the vehicles that are frequently parked in parking lots (near offices or shopping plazas etc.…”

“…Mobile operators feel reluctant to make investments in infrastructure where the return on investment is low (as in the above-mentioned scenario). The non-static nature of moving networks makes them an ideal and cost effective alternative as compared to fixed small cell infrastructure as discussed in [23], [52], [68], [108], [109].…”

“…In [109], the authors found that the throughput improvement was roughly 60% greater when mobile cells were static as compared to when they were moving at a speed of 40 Km/h. Based on this observation, new use-cases of moving networks were explored in other researches [68], [108], [109], [111], [112].…”

“…To address the above issues, different researchers proposed to install base stations on the vehicles that frequently move back and forth between regions of fluctuating cellular demands, such as, between homes and offices [108], [109], [111], [112]. This way the moving network travels 'with' the cellular users.…”

5G uplink interference simulations, analysis and solutions: The case of pico cells dense deployment

“…New radio techniques are being explored in 5G cellular systems. One of the main lines of research in this field focuses on the use of small 5G cells, the deployment of massive antenna techniques and the use of 'COMP' coordination techniques between cells [2].…”