Adaptive Network Architecture with Moving Nodes Towards Beyond 5G Era

In metropolitan areas, spatio-temporal patterns of human mobility result in significant fluctuations of mobile traffic. Such fluctuations drastically deteriorate the efficiency and financial viability of conventional mobile networks. This is because mobile networks have been designed to cope with the peak traffic, and thus their capacities are underutilized for most of time. To make matters worse, this trend will be intensified with the increase in mobile traffic. To address this issue, this paper proposes a concept of adaptive mobile network architecture with moving nodes towards beyond 5G era. It consists of densely deployed radio units (RUs) and moving distributed units (DUs) in the centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture. The mobile traffic is forwarded through optical midhaul links and wireless relay fronthaul links satisfying the latency requirement. This paper also proposes an algorithm for optimizing the activation states of RUs, the relocation schedule of DUs, and forwarding paths of fronthaul streams according to the demand distribution. It was confirmed with computer simulations that the proposed architecture can efficiently activate RUs and DUs by optimizing the location of DUs and forwarding paths of fronthaul streams.