Introducing Mobile Edge Computing Capabilities through Distributed 5G Cloud Enabled Small Cells

Abstract

Abstract:Current trends in broadband mobile networks are addressed towards the placement of different capabilities at the edge of the mobile network in a centralised way. On one hand, the split of the eNB between baseband processing units and remote radio headers makes it possible to process some of the protocols in centralised premises, likely with virtualised resources. On the other hand, mobile edge computing makes use of processing and storage capabilities close to the air interface in order to deploy optimised services with minimum delay. The confluence of both trends is a hot topic in the definition of future 5G networks. The full centralisation of both technologies in cloud data centres imposes stringent requirements to the fronthaul connections in terms of throughput and latency. Therefore, all those cells with limited network access would not be able to offer these types of services. This paper proposes a solution for these cases, based on the placement of processing and storage capabilities close to the remote units, which is especially well suited for the deployment of clusters of small cells. The proposed cloudenabled small cells include a highly efficient microserver with a limited set of virtualised resources offered to the cluster of small cells. As a result, a light data centre is created and commonly used for deploying centralised eNB and mobile edge computing functionalities. The paper covers the proposed architecture, with special focus on the integration of both aspects, and possible scenarios of application.

Quality of Service (QoS) oriented management system in 5G cloud enabled RAN

“…Depending on the functional split, central cloud can take part in a different layer of the softwarized upper layer protocols. Depending on the case, it can process just the VNFs form the upper protocol layers or the whole softwarized stack as initially proposed [7]. A Hybrid NFV manager is proposed to orchestrate both clouds in an unified manner.…”

Security Challenges of Small Cell as a Service in Virtualized Mobile Edge Computing Environments

“…1 Fig. 1 could be, for example, the SESAME architecture [16], [24]. However, in this work we intentionally keep our considered system architecture as generic as possible in order to accommodate a wide range of implementation choices of the SCaaS concept.…”

On Radio Access Network Slicing from a Radio Resource Management Perspective

“…In turn, SESAME [9] addresses multi-tenancy in Small Cell as a Service (SCaaS) and corresponding implications in terms of Self-Organizing Network (SON) features.…”