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With exploding demand for mobile broadband services and emergence of new high-capacity mobile
devices and data-intensive applications, the world’s most advanced mobile networks will increasingly
struggle to deliver a high-quality consumer experience. As networks continuously evolve to meet
capacity and coverage demands with the latest technological capabilities (i.e., 3.5G, 4G), network costs
are exploding, network upgrade costs are passed on to the consumer via data caps and operators
struggle to maintain profitable businesses.
Although Long Term Evolution (LTE) promises two to three times capacity improvement over current
3G networks, this will be insufficient to address future expected capacity demands. Mobile data traffic
is forecast to double every year, growing 32 times by 20141.
Acquiring more LTE spectrum would help operators provide more capacity, but additional spectrum is
costly and in most cases not available. The latest enhancement to LTE, LTE-Advanced, will increase
spectral efficiency and new traffic management approaches such as caching and mobile offloading
(e.g., mobile gateways, femto-cells, Wi-Fi, etc) also offer promise of higher network capacities.
However, due to the vast amount of mobile data demand these solutions will be insufficient to address
the capacity shortfall. A new approach is required.
Because there are now many more sites in hard-to-reach locations, small
cells create a host of new challenges for the backhaul network. As a result,
backhaul will be the central challenge for enabling widespread adoption of
small cells.
However, because of challenging utility pole and lamppost deployments, operators cannot rely on fixed
line options (such as fiber, cable, copper/DSL) being ubiquitously available and will instead
increasingly rely on wireless solutions for small cell backhaul.
1
Cisco VNI: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast 2010.
• Lower cost solutions needed. Smaller cells mean many more cell sites and thus more backhaul
links. To meet overall cost objectives, dramatically lower cost backhaul solutions are required.
Macro-cell backhaul CAPEX is typically on the order 50 percent of total base station CAPEX. A
lower ratio would be desired to ensure a cost-effective, acceptable solution.
• Space-optimized solutions required. Challenging lamppost and utility pole deployment locations
place restrictions on the physical attributes of any backhaul solution. Unlike traditional cell sites,
typical dish antennas will not be feasible for such deployments. In addition, because of space
constraints and operational costs, integrated backhaul and basestation hardware will be required.
• Line-of-Sight (LOS) not possible. Street level, metro area deployments mean line-of-sight to
backhaul hub locations is not always—in fact, rarely—possible. Directional dish antennas,
combined with lack of LOS characteristics, mean that traditional point-to-point wireless backhaul
will be unsuitable for most small cell backhaul applications.
• Interference must be carefully managed. When backhauling multiple sites simultaneously, the
close proximity of cell sites creates possible interference issues for the backhaul system. These
interference issues do not exist with licensed point-to-point microwave backhaul, although
careful attention for spectrum re-use will be needed because many more frequency pairs will be
needed.
• High capacity solutions required. Driven by increasing demand for mobile data, backhaul
requirements for small cells are expected to approach macro cell capacity requirements (50-100
Mbit/s per cell site) in next three years.
These wireless solutions are easily deployed and will work well in dense urban areas where LOS
conditions are not always available.
Low cost and ease-of-reach to lampposts or utility poles, where fiber or other wireline backhaul are
generally not present, make wireless a very attractive choice for small cell backhaul applications
Traditional NLOS solutions, such as WiMAX, Wi-Fi, etc., provide insufficient capacity for cellular
backhaul. Novel solutions will be required to deal with fading and interference, providing more
efficient utilization of available spectrum. These include efficient interference management, multiple-
input and multiple-output, (MIMO) antenna techniques and efficient scheduling and resource (e.g.,
rate, frequency) allocation algorithms.
Beam-forming techniques deploy multiple antennas to form highly directional beams to intended
recipients and null interference for others, minimizing interference among simultaneous
transmissions. Multiple antennas will also be deployed to send multiple data streams over the
wireless channel, achieving multi-fold capacity increases.
New NLOS solutions can enable lower OPEX—ensuring costs associated with smaller cells are
managed carefully. Particular attention must be paid to offline planning and system design including
site preparation, initial equipment testing, automated configuration creation and download, and
antenna alignment/adjustment for end node and hub sites.
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