“A Fully-Decoupled RAN Architecture for 6G Inspired By Neurotransmission” published in ‘Journal of Communications and Information Networks’ was honored as Excellent scientific and technological papers in Electronic Information Field. As the first and second authors, Yu Quan and Zhou Haibo were commended by the Chinese Society of Electronics, where only 8 people in China were awarded this honor.
While the commercial deployment and promotion of 5G is ongoing, mobile communication networks are still facing three fundamental challenges, i.e., spectrum resource scarcity, especially for low-frequency spectrum, exacerbated by fragmented spectrum allocation, user-centric network service provision when facing billions of personalized user demands in the era of Internet of everything (IoE), and proliferating operation costs mainly due to huge energy consumption of network infrastructure. To address these issues, it is imperative to consider and develop disruptive technologies in the next generation mobile communication networks, namely 6G. In this paper, by studying brain neurons and the neurotransmission, authors propose the fully-decoupled radio access network (FD-RAN). In the FD-RAN, base stations (BSs) are physically decoupled into control BSs and data BSs, and the data BSs are further physically split into uplink BSs and downlink BSs. Authors first review the fundamentals of neurotransmission and then propose the 6G design principles inspired by the neurotransmission. Based on the principles, authors propose the FD-RAN architecture, elastic resource cooperation in FD-RAN, and improved transport service layer design. The proposed fully decoupled and flexible architecture can profoundly facilitate resource cooperation to enhance the spectrum utilization, reduce the network energy consumption and improve the quality of user experience. Future research topics in this direction are envisioned and discussed.
In order to encourage scientists and engineers in the field of electronic information to publish their excellent scientific research and original research achievements in China, The Chinese Society of Electronics has been carrying out the selection of Excellent scientific papers in the field of electronic information since 2019. Each year, the papers with influence in the academic circle and breakthroughs in the forefront of science and technology will be selected Outstanding papers with leading role in original innovation, a total of 8 papers were selected in 2020.
