ABSORB: Autonomous base station with optical reflex backhaul to adapt to fluctuating demand

Metropolitan areas witness significant fluctuations in mobile traffic due to patterns of human mobility. This fluctuation drastically deteriorates the efficiency and financial viability of conventional maximum-based network design. If networks are deployed to deal with the peak traffic rate at each site, their capacities are underutilized for most of time. To improve the efficiency of deploying base stations (BSs), this paper proposes a concept of an Autonomous Base Station with Optical Reflex Backhaul (ABSORB) architecture that can adapt to fluctuations in mobile traffic. In the ABSORB architecture, traffic at demand nodes is forwarded to and from an ABS with an arbitrary radio access technology (RAT). An ABS is connected to a gateway node through ORB, which consists of fiber optic networks. ABSs move to new locations following the demand movement, according to a relocation schedule that is periodically rearranged by an ABSORB controller. The network is flexibly reconstructed according to the demand distribution. The ABSORB architecture can be employed in various networks, and can coexist with traditional static architectures. It will drastically reduce the number of BSs, total deployment cost, and power consumption in comparison with the traditional design.