With access to mobile data services in public transport vehicles becoming increasingly common, the demand is set to rise. Up till now, the deployment of moving-base stations on public transport, with each vehicle forming a moving network (MN), was considered the most efficient. But inter-cell interference, worsened by the street canyon effect, constitutes a challenge, especially in urban areas. And with wireless data traffic predicted to increase drastically over the next decade, solutions that meet the capacity demand of 5th generation mobile communication systems are necessary.
Researchers from Florida International University seem to have found one. Yutao Sui, Ismail Guvenc, and Tommy Svensson presented their research at the 2014 5G for Ubiquitous Connectivity conference in Levi, Finland. Having compared various alternatives, they argue that using MNs with advanced multi-antenna systems improves the quality of the service for vehicular users without compromising the performance of regular outdoor users.
They explain that such advanced antenna solutions can be integrated into moving relay nodes of the vehicles because the latter are not significantly constrained by power and transceiver complexity. The necessary modifications of the current mobile communication systems proposed by them appear to be easy to implement by simply introducing new protocols.
Learn more about why the use of moving networks constitutes a promising approach by reading the full paper here.
