What Should Future Wireless Network Architectures Be?

The accelerated convergence of digital and real-world lifestyles has imposed unprecedented demands on today's wireless network architectures, as it is highly desirable for such architectures to support wireless devices everywhere with high capacity and minimal signaling overhead. Conventional architectures, such as cellular architectures, are not able to satisfy these requirements simultaneously, and are thus no longer suitable for the future era. In this paper, we propose a capacity-centric (C$^2$) architecture for future wireless communication networks. It is designed based on the principles of maximizing the number of non-overlapping clusters with the average cluster capacity guaranteed to be higher than a certain threshold, and thus provides a flexible way to balance the capacity requirement against the signaling overhead. Our analytical results reveal that C$^2$ has superior generality, wherein both the cellular and the fully coordinated architectures can be viewed as its extreme cases. Simulation results show that the average capacity of C$^2$ is at least three times higher compared to that of the cellular architecture. More importantly, different from the widely adopted conventional wisdom that base-station distributions dominate architecture designs, we find that the C$^2$ architecture is independent of base-station distributions, and instead user-side information should be the focus in future wireless network architecture designs.