Power and frequency efficient wireless multi-hop virtual cellular concept

Recently, major services provided by mobile communications systems are shifting from voice conversations to data communications over the Internet. There is a strong demand for increasing the data transmission rate. However, an important problem arises; larger peak transmit power is required as transmission rate becomes higher. In this paper, we propose a wireless multi-hop virtual cellular concept to avoid this power problem. The virtual cellular network consists of a central port, which is a gateway to the network, and many distributed wireless ports. Transmit power and frequency efficiencies of the virtual cellular network are evaluated by computer simulation to compare with that of the present cellular networks. In the wireless multi-hop virtual cellular network, routing among wireless ports is an important technical issue. We propose a routing algorithm based on the total uplink transmit power minimization criterion and evaluate the total transmit power by computer simulation.