A Super Base Station Architecture for Future Ultra-Dense Cellular Networks: Toward Low Latency and High Energy Efficiency

To meet the explosive growth of mobile data traffic, ultra-dense networks have emerged to enhance spatial and spectral efficiency. Densely deployed small cell architecture faces several major challenges, including low infrastructure utilization ratio, severe inter-cell interference, and so on. In this article, we aim to develop a novel super base station (SupBS) network architecture to tackle these issues. The proposed SupBS architecture consists of two layers, namely, an infrastructure layer and a virtualized network layer. In the infrastructure layer, there are three key physical components: the hybrid heterogeneous radio unit pool, line interface switch unit, and computing resources pool. In the virtualized network layer, there are two logical modules designed on top of the three physical components, namely, the virtualized base station and virtualized software defined core network. The two logical modules are designed to facilitate the use of the underlying three physical components by reducing the energy consumption and processing delay. We present the functionalities of the two virtualized modules and explain how they are utilized to create virtual networks. Moreover, we demonstrate a recently developed SupBS prototype, and provide an application scenario for this prototype in an Internet information broadcast-storage system to show the advantages of our architecture.