Abstract
To meet the ever increasing mobile data traffic demand, the mobile operators are deploying a
heterogeneous network with multiple access technologies and more and more base stations to
increase the network coverage and capacity. However, the base stations are isolated from each
other, so different types of radio resources and hardware resources cannot be shared and allocated
within the overall network in a cooperative way. The mobile operators are thus facing increasing
network operational expenses and a high system power consumption. In this paper, a centralized
radio access network architecture, referred to as the super base station (super BS), is proposed, as
a possible solution for an energy-efficient fifth-generation (5G) mobile system. The super base
station decouples the logical functions and physical entities of traditional base stations, so different
types of system resources can be horizontally shared and statistically multiplexed among all the
virtual base stations throughout the entire system. The system framework and main functionalities
of the super BS are described. Some key technologies for system implementation, i.e., the resource
pooling, real-time virtualization, adaptive hardware resource allocation are also highlighted.
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