Analysis and Simulation for Radio Access Network Architecture of 3GPP Long Term Evolution

In this paper, two popular radio access network architectures, centralized architecture and distributed architecture, are analyzed. Then we propose a novel architecture on the basis of the comparisons and system level simulation results. In this new architecture, control plane and user plane are terminated in different nodes and can be processed simultaneously. Analysis and simulation results show that this proposed network architecture can provide better performance in lower signaling overhead and robustness.