Apt-RAN: A Flexible Split Based 5G RAN to Minimize Energy Consumption and Handovers

Gupta, Himank and Sharma, Mehul and Franklin, Antony and Tamma, Bheemarjuna Reddy (2020) Apt-RAN: A Flexible Split Based 5G RAN to Minimize Energy Consumption and Handovers. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. p. 1. ISSN 2373-7379

Text
Network_and_Service_Management.pdf - Published Version
Restricted to Registered users only
Download (3MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

The recent adoption of virtualized technologies in Next Generation Radio Access Network (NG-RAN) has driven a significant impact on energy consumption by subsequently decreasing the number of active base stations. The base station (gNodeB) of 5G is segregated into cost-efficient Central Units (CU) hosted on virtual platforms and cheaper & smaller Distributed Units (DU) present at the cell sites. Multiple CUs are pooled together in a single powerful central cloud, known as CU pool. The logical connection between DU and CU can be dynamically adjusted and can potentially affect the energy consumption of the CU pool. The deployment of NG-RAN imposes strict latency requirements on the fronthaul link that connects DUs to CU. To relax these strict latency requirements, various alternate architectures such as Flexible RAN Functional Splits have been proposed by 3GPP. In this paper, we first evaluate the energy consumption of DU and CU for various functional split options using OpenAirInterface (OAI), a real-time open source software radio solution. We find that lower layer splits have high energy consumption at CU as compared to higher layer split options. We also observe the variation in energy consumption due to traffic heterogeneity. Motivated by the above study, we formulate an optimization model, Apt-RAN, that optimizes the energy consumption of the CU pool and the number of handovers, considering different functional splits. To address the computational complexity of solving the optimization model, a lightweight polynomial time heuristic algorithm is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms existing state-of-art schemes.

[error in script]

IITH Creators:

IITH Creators	ORCiD
Franklin, Antony	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1809-2025
Tamma, Bheemarjuna Reddy	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4056-7963

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

Manuscript received August 7, 2019; revised October 11, 2019; accepted October 13, 2019. Date of publication October 21, 2019; date of current version March 11, 2020. This work was supported by the project CCRAN: Energy Efficiency in Converged Cloud Radio Next Generation Access Network, Intel India. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was R. Riggio. (Corresponding author: Himank Gupta.) The authors are with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Hyderabad 502285, India (e-mail: cs16mtech01001@iith.ac.in). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNSM.2019.2948457

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Central Unit (CU, Distributed Unit (DU), Flexible functional splits, Handovers, Open Air Interface (OAI), CU Pool..

Subjects:

Computer science

Divisions:

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Depositing User:

Team Library

Date Deposited:

13 Nov 2019 04:11

Last Modified:

26 Oct 2022 09:33