New concept of a modular wireless base station and benefits for network management and energy efficiency

The conventional base station will not long fulfill network needs. New requirements, as scalability to support varying traffic load, flexibility in provided features, adoption to novel network architectures, requirements on energy efficiency let us believe that the "Plain Old Base Station" is going to change. Sophisticated modularization can give the answer to the upcoming challenges. In this paper we propose a Scalable Architecture for Resource Adaptive Networks (SAfRAN) which opens up new opportunities in development of base stations and wireless network management. We show benefits of the proposed base station architectural design. The concept SAfRAN bases on the idea that capability of base station (BS) transceivers to transfer data may not be evenly distributed with respect to the overall resource elements used for data transmission. Therefore a base station can be equipped with adjustable capabilities and flexible data transport resource elements. SAfRAN fulfils the requirements for energy efficiency, coverage on the fly, performance on the fly and bandwidth on the fly by combination of clustering, scalability and parallelization.