Wireless Access Architecture: The Next 20+ Years

The very fundamental principles of digital and wireless communications reveal that the provision of ubiquitous super-connectivity in the global scale – i.e., beyond indoors, dense downtown or campus-type areas – is infeasible with the legacy terrestrial network architecture as this would require prohibitively expensive gross over-provisioning. The problem will only exacerbate with even more demanding use-cases of 2030s such as UAVs requiring connectivity (ex: delivery drones), thus the 3D super-connectivity. The roots of today’s wireless access architecture (the terrestrial 4G & 5G cellular network) go back to 1940s. The access architecture has evolved substantially over the decades. However, rapid developments in a number of domains outside telecommunications, including those in aerospace and satellite industries as well as in artificial intelligence, will likely result in a disruptive transformation in the wireless access architecture in the next 20+ years. In this talk, an ultra-agile, dynamic, distributed, and partly-autonomous vertical heterogeneous network (VHetNet) architecture with very low earth orbit satellites (VLEOs), high-altitude platform station (HAPS) systems, and UAV-BSs (UxNB in 3GPP terminology) for almost-ubiquitous super-connectivity will be presented. In the envisioned VHetNet architecture, the HAPS systems constitute arguably the most promising tier. For more information on HAPS systems, please refer to the below papers under review: [5],[1],[4],[2],[3].