Cellular Network Architectures for the Society in Motion

Due to rising mobility worldwide, a growing number of people utilizes cellular network services while on the move. Persistent urbanization trends raise the number of daily commuters, leading to a situation where telecommunication requirements are mainly dictated by two categories of users: 1) Static users inside buildings, demanding instantaneous and virtually bandwidth unlimited access to the Internet and Cloud services; 2) moving users outside, expecting ubiquitous and seamless mobility even at high velocity. While most work on future mobile communications is motivated by the first category of users, we outline in this article a layered cellular network architecture that has the potential to efficiently support both user groups simultaneously. We deduce novel transceiver architectures and derive research questions that need to be tackled to effectively maintain wireless connectivity for the envisioned Society in Motion.