Feasibility of Base Station Coordination and Dynamic Backhaul Network Configuration in Backhaul Networks with Limited Capacity

Coordinating base stations (BSs) in current and future mobile access networks is an important approach to reduce interference and to achieve high data rates. One coordination approach is Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission, in which a set of multiple BSs transmit data to a user equipment (UE) in a coordinated manner. Among the BSs CoMP requires high capacities and low latencies in the backhaul network connecting the BSs. We have developed an optimization problem and a heuristic algorithm that verify the feasibility of BSs coordination in a backhaul network with limited capacity. In addition to that, our approach also assigns backhaul network resources (i.e. wavelengths in an optical WDM backhaul) proportional to the actual requirements. We call this backhaul network configuration. Our evaluations show that the heuristic algorithm performs close to the optimal solution, while reducing the execution time by about four orders of magnitude. We also show how our approach can be used to operate the backhaul network in a trafficproportional way to reduce the overall energy consumption of the backhaul network.