Flexible Network Deployment in 5G: Performance of Vehicular Nomadic Nodes

The Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile and wireless networks is expected to fulfill the requirements of high variety of new use cases. One of the key challenges will be the varying capacity and coverage demands, non-uniformly distributed over space and time. In the current wireless networks, small cells are deployed at fixed locations via network planning, and, hence, lack the flexibility of reacting to spatially varying service requirements. Dynamic radio topology is an emerging concept towards 5G to address the real- time provisioning of services by means of flexible network deployment. In this regard, one promising system element of flexible network deployment to complement the existing heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is Vehicular Nomadic Nodes (VNNs). A VNN is a low-power access node which has a flexible backhaul, is movable, and activated temporarily to provide additional system capacity and/or coverage on demand. VNNs can be integrated into vehicles especially in urban areas, such as those of car sharing fleets or taxicab services. In this work, system-level performance of VNNs considering several flexible deployment scenarios is evaluated. Experiments are carried out separately in uplink (UL) and downlink (DL), where the performance of VNNs in terms of the user throughputs is compared with that of stationary picocells in a fixed HetNet, taking the macrocell- only deployment as the reference. The results show that flexible network deployment via VNNs is a promising enhancement to the current HetNets.