A Feasibility Study for the Detached Cell Concept

Given the significantly increasing demand for higher data rates and system capacity with minimal cost and energy in the future, new mobile network architectures, that can cope with these stringent requirements, need to be developed. A new wireless network architecture based on the physical separation of the Control Signal Plane (C-Plane) and the User Data Plane (U-Plane) has recently been proposed to attempt to fulfil these requirements. This paper introduces an initial feasibility study assessing the reliability and the potential energy savings of a system based on such an architecture, which we call Detached Cell Concept (DCC). A simple system-level simulator is introduced, as well as an algorithm to minimize the number of base stations (BSs) turned on while still being able to serve all mobile stations (MSs) - a scheme which significantly reduces the energy consumption of the network. This paper presents some very interesting results which show that network densification and separation of the C- and U-Planes have many benefits.