Phantom Cell Architecture for LTE and its Application in Vehicular IoT Environments

Proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices (smart wearables/vehicles, etc.) in the near future, would raise the capacity and bandwidth demands from the cellular infrastructure manifold. Deploying small cells is an effective solution to cope with the problem. This work focuses on a special kind of small eNBs, termed as Phantom eNBs. Phantom eNB acts as a supplement to the current radio access network (RAN) in the LTE infrastructure. It handles the data plane while a Macro eNB holds the control plane. Definitions of control and data plane, along with the modifications n e eded i n t h e p r otocol s t ack a r e e x plained i n this paper. Communication mechanisms are developed for Phantom and Macro eNB to communicate over the X2 interface between them. NS-3 simulations are performed for handover scenarios of Vehicular IoT environment, consolidating the architecture and network topology designed for Phantom based Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). Network throughput improvements of 80% and 14% are observed in comparison to the Macro-only RAN and existing small cell solutions (Femto cells), respectively. Received on 09 May 2015; accepted on 08 July 2015; published on 13 July 2015