Energy Efficiency Using Cloud Management of LTE Networks Employing Fronthaul and Virtualized Baseband Processing Pool

Abstract

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) emerges as one of the future solutions to handle the ever-growing data traffic, which is beyond the physical resources of current mobile networks. The C-RAN decouples the traffic management operations from the radio access technologies, leading to a new combination of a virtualized network core and a fronthaul architecture. This new resource coordination provides the necessary network control to manage dense Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks overlaid with femtocells. However, the energy expenditure poses a major challenge for a typical C-RAN that consists of extended virtualized processing units and dense fronthaul data interfaces. In response to the power efficiency requirements and dynamic changes in traffic, this paper proposes C-RAN solutions and algorithms that compute the optimal backup topology and network mapping solution while denying interfacing requests from low-flow or inactive femtocells. A graph-coloring scheme is developed to label new formulated fronthaul clusters of femtocells using power as the performance metric. Additional power savings are obtained through efficient allocations of the virtualized baseband units (BBUs) subject to the arrival rate of active fronthaul interfacing requests. Moreover, the proposed solutions are used to reduce power consumption for virtualized LTE networks operating in the Wi-Fi spectrum band. The virtualized network core use the traffic load variations to determine those femtocells who are unable to transmit to switch them off for additional power savings. The simulation results demonstrate an efficient performance of the given solutions in large-scale network models.

On Energy Efficient Resource Allocation in Shared RANs: Survey and Qualitative Analysis

“…Unlike the majority of works that approached the energy efficiency optimization on the C-RAN and overlooked computational or radio optimization aspects, recent research works [1], [108], [207], [209], [210] undertook steps towards designing EE multi-resource allocation. This category of research caters for the nature of resources in cloud-based RAN environment and provides a more overall optimization, by considering both resource aspects; hence, very relevant to our research work.…”

“…Ensuring energy efficient allocation is directly associated with reduced OPEX. Several research works [1]- [5] focused on energy efficient resource allocation processes, leveraging on the application of the aforementioned paradigm. Resources, in that context, can be antennas or Baseband Units (BBU).…”

“…There have been valuable research efforts on the application of SDN/NFV and autonomous management of RAN, in 5G RAN sharing [3] and leveraging these for 5G RAN Slicing [4]- [5]. On the other hand, others have proposed EE RA for C-RANs [1]- [2]. Further works [6] address EE RA with multi-operator sharing, by proposing a roaming based sharing scheme that switches-off low-load Mobile Network Operator (MNO) Base Stations (BSs), and roam their traffic to active BSs, operated by other MNOs.…”

A Framework of Network Connectivity Management in Multi-Clouds Infrastructure

“…To setup a call between two UEs located at two different clusters, two geo-datacenters need to be involved in such operation. This can be unrealistic as those two clusters might belong to the same operator causing unnecessary duplicate resource and power consumption at different sites within the same operator [15].…”

Industrial Internet of Things Driven by SDN Platform for Smart Grid Resiliency

“…The tremendous growth in the amount of electric data generated by utility providers and customer needs to be monitored, analysed, and controlled especially in the modern smart grid technologies that require adaptive network bandwidth. Using SDN can enhance the smart grid networks by decoupling of infrastructure and control plane to increase the flexibility, interoperability, and reliability of the system, and reduces the cost incurred during any network upgraded due to simplified hardware operation [16]. In software based networks, SDN [17] controller is able to extract the data using control function from data forwarding/infrastructure plane to reschedule and reconfigure the available resources.…”