Resilient BBU placement in 5G C-RAN over optical aggregation networks

The huge data demand envisioned for the 5G requires radical changes in the mobile network architecture and technology. Centralized radio access network (C-RAN) is introduced as a novel mobile network architecture, designed to effectively support the challenging requirements of the future 5G mobile networks. In C-RAN, BaseBand Units (BBUs) are physically separated from their corresponding radio remote heads (RRHs) and located in a central single physical location called BBU pool. The RRHs are connected to the BBU pool via the so-called fronthaul network. The “centralization” demonstrates remarkable benefits in terms of computational resources as well as power savings. Following this centralization, designing a survivable C-RAN becomes crucial as BBU pool and link failures might cause service outage for large number of users. In this paper, we propose three different approaches for the survivable BBU pool placement problem and traffic routing in C-RAN deployment over a 5G optical aggregation network. Namely, we define the following protection scenarios: (1) dedicated path protection, (2) dedicated BBU protection and (3) dedicated BBU and path protection. The three approaches are formalized as integer linear programming (ILP) problems. The ILPs objectives are to minimize the number of BBU pools, the number of used wavelengths and the baseband processing computational resources, in terms of giga operations per second. We provide numerical results to compare the aforementioned protection strategies considering different network topologies. The results show the effect of the latency and the transport–network capacity on the BBU placement. We show the trade-off between the centralization degree and the tight latency requirements. Moreover, we discuss important insights about considering the different objective functions for each protection approach

A Shared-Path Shared-Compute Planning Strategy for a Resilient Hybrid C-RAN

One key challenge in 5G networks is to guarantee the survivability of services in the event of failures. This paper focuses on the hybrid cloud radio access network (H-CRAN) architecture. The proposed strategy guarantees survivability in the presence of failures affecting nodes/links in the midhaul segment (i.e., connecting the radio aggregation unit (RAU) nodes to their respective radio cloud center (RCC) nodes) as well as compute resources (i.e., servers) in the RCC nodes. In the envisioned strategy each RAU node is connected to a primary and a backup RCC node (i.e., with backup compute resources) via two node disjoint connectivity paths in the midhaul. The proposed strategy, called Shared-Path Shared-Compute Planning (SPSCP), lowers the overall design cost by trying to share as much as possible backup connectivity and compute resources among RAU nodes. This is made possible by introducing a shareability metric early into the RCC node selection process so that the chance of sharing backup resources is maximized. Simulation results show that the SPSCP strategy can lead to up to 28% cost savings when compared to conventional resilient design strategie

5G Dimensioning And Optimization Through Use Analysis Of A Real Scenario

Mobile networks have become essential to our daily communications. The growth of mobile traffic and users has increased exponentially in recent years, with increasing demands on throughput and latency. To handle this growing traffic, a scaling strategy that guarantees quality of service over time is essential. This thesis proposes the dimensioning of a mobile network based on a real 4G scenario, using techniques such as the implementation of new carriers and 5G technology. It also proposes the dynamic implementation of Cloud RAN, assigning the location of BBU pools according to network characteristics