Today, almost everyone has a personal computing appliance, and base-stations are aggressively deployed to serve these customers. However, the cellular network backbone may become overloaded behind these convenient personal services, especially in the near future of International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000). Therefore, this study presents a scalable Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) cellular network backbone to provide plenty of bandwidth up to Giga-bits/s, even to Tera-bits/s. In this paper, we propose a WDM-based solution for cellular network backbone, which originates from the shuffle-exchange network concept. Then, we demonstrate the self-routing scheme and several wireless related issues in the proposed cellular network backbone by taking advantage of the feature of shuffle-exchange network. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed backbone, and compare to another similar scheme. Our analysis indicates that the proposed network provides self-routing capability in a cellular network backbone with a modest number of fiber links, which reasonably scales to the number of base stations. This study also provides a further insight on the issues of wireless cellular network backbone and demonstrates a referable methodology to propose and analyze a cellular network backbone, which can promote the technology of mobile computing.
