The ETSI BRAN 1 Gbps/km2 cost-efficient cognitive communications architecture

Capacity calculations reveal that required data rates in urban environments are in the order of 1 Gbps/km2, which is beyond any forward looking state-of-the-art. Following the BuNGee [1] design approach, we outline in this paper an aggressive joint access and backhaul design which allows one powerful (and expensive) hub base station to feed several distributed (and cost efficient) access base stations at the same time as these communicate with associated user - all using the same band. The hence resulting interference environment is extremely dynamic and has eluded a viable communication strategy thus far. We propose however a novel distributed cognitive mechanism, which facilitates the capacity needs to be satisfied at these dynamics whilst being of low complexity and high reliability. Simulation results corroborate our findings and the architectural design has found its entry to ETSI BRAN standardization activities [2].