A demonstration of evolved user equipment for collaborative wireless backhauling in next generation cellular networks

In this work, we demonstrate and validate a novel architecture for next generation cellular networks that enables collaborative forwarding at Layer 2 among adjacent eNBs with the aid of enhanced user equipment (UE) devices, that act voluntarily as packet forwarders. We introduce an evolved-UE (eUE) which is capable of operating simultaneously over multiples eNBs in order to enable reliable multi-hop operation through relaying and to achieve low-latency communication through efficient L2/MAC forwarding. For the demonstration and the evaluation of this architecture, we used the OpenAirInterface emulation platform to implement it, and also to evaluate its performance. The obtained results show that, the proposed architecture achieves significant reduction in latency (up to 16.94%) and improvement on packet loss rate (up to 59.25%), as the number of the employed eUEs increases with increasing BLER up to 20%. Moreover, the proposed architecture enables eUEs to increase the aggregated data rate in downlink by exploiting data connection to multiple eNBs.