Small Cells Enabled by Crowdsourced Radio Units Mounted on Parked Vehicles for Smart City

A large number of small cells are densely deployed in the era of 5G and beyond 5G mobile networks to achieve high rate and low latency data transmission. Small cells are composed with fixed ground radio units (RUs) in the conventional networks, and thus the utilization rate of them is drastically deteriorated due to the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile traffic demand. To address this problem, adaptive network architectures have been investigated to reconfigure networks on demand using small cells mounted on moving objects such as vehicles and drones. However, it has been difficult to establish stable communication link to ground nodes in high-speed environments with these schemes. Therefore, this paper proposes a concept of small cells composed with crowdsourced RUs mounted on parked vehicles. They are activated based on the traffic demand in surrounding area by road side units (RSUs) assuming a smart city. The proposed idea is based on the correlation between the distribution of people and the occupancy rate of parking lots. It can efficiently improve user throughput with relatively small number of RUs. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is validated through numerical analysis, computer simulations, and experimental results.