SpiderNet: Spectrally Efficient and Energy Efficient Data Aided Demand Driven Elastic Architecture for 6G

Abstract

Legacy base station (BS) centric cellular architecture is marked by tight interlock between spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). That means, unless new degrees of freedom and intelligent dynamic adaptability is added, any significant gain in SE must come at the cost of EE. Even the most predominant approaches for capacity enhancement such as network densification yield gains in SE at the cost of increased energy consumption. Moreover, in future mobile networks, the key challenge is not only the rampantly growing volume of traffic, but also the spatiotemporal variability of the traffic. These observations call for a paradigm shift in the way cellular networks are designed and operated. Therefore, in this work, we propose a new cellular architecture called SpiderNet: Spectrally Efficient and Energy Efficient Data Aided Demand Driven Elastic Architecture for 6G Wireless Networks. The key idea behind SpiderNet is to introduce additional degrees of freedom to relax the tight coupling between the SE and EE and database-Aided intelligence to enable dynamic adaptive operation for simultaneous enhancement of both SE and EE. This goal is achieved by shifting the pivot of operation from the rigid always ON BS centric cells to user centric (UC) on demand cells. The SpiderNet architecture consists of a layer of low-density large footprint and database aided control BS underlayed by high-density switchable data BS. This database enables artificial intelligence (AI) powered proactive dynamic orchestration of UC cells to maximize not only SE and EE, but quality of experience (QoE) as well. We also identify the challenges that arise in the practical realization of SpiderNet and propose solutions. Finally, we present a case study that compares SpiderNet performance with legacy HetNets. The results show that compared to current BS centric cellular architecture, SpiderNet can substantially enhance both SE and EE without compromising QoE.