Experimental evaluation of functional splits for 5G Cloud-RANs

Makrisy, Nikos; Basarasy, Pavlos; Korakisy, Thanasis; Nikaein, Navid; Tassiulas, Leandros
ICC 2017, IEEE International Conference on Communications, May 21-25, 2017, Paris, France

Centralized RAN processing has been identified as one of the major enablers for 5G mobile network access. By moving the baseband units (BBU) to the Cloud, multiple instances can be instantiated on the fly, serving several Remote Radio Head (RRH) units. The goal is to satisfy the existing demand of particular geographical areas, whereas drastically reducing the overall CAPEX and OPEX costs of the mobile operators.
In this work, we present an experimental study of real Cloud-RAN deployments, with respect to different functional splits. We use as a reference architecture the 3GPP LTE stack, and argue about the functional split applicability in contemporary networks.
We evaluate Layer 2 functional splits, that can be used for the convergence of multiple heterogeneous wireless technologies in an all-in-one unit. By deploying our approach in a real testbed setup, we extract the backhaul network transfer requirements for the different splits and present our experimental findings, compared with the respective simulation results.

DOI
Type:
Conférence
City:
Paris
Date:
2017-05-21
Department:
Systèmes de Communication
Eurecom Ref:
5156
Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
See also:

PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/5156