Rapid recovery of base station backhaul by the neighbor regional wireless access network and its extension with the multi-hop wireless LAN relay

Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011 caused serious damages in various fields of our life. Telecommunication networks, which have recently become vital infrastructure, were not the exception and destroyed at various points as well. The rapid recovery of the damaged network infrastructure plays a crucial and important role for the communications and the information exchanges among affected regions, emergency evacuation centers and public offices. The authors have started research and development on the rapid recovery of the disrupted communication links, especially of the backhaul connectivity of the base stations (BS) in the Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMN). The key technology is the use of the multilayered communications network which makes use of various wireless network technologies with different properties and attributes. The authors employed the regional wireless access network and its extension by the multi-hop wireless Local Access Network (LAN) relay for the recovery of BS backhaul connectivity. This paper introduces the concepts, requirements and challenges, which should be overcome through the research and development, for the recovery of the BS backhaul connectivity by other wireless access networks under the disaster situations.