Energy-Efficient DU-CU Deployment and Lightpath Provisioning for Service-Oriented 5G Metro Access/Aggregation Networks

Abstract

To accommodate ever-growing mobile data and heterogeneous 5G services, considerable challenges have emerged to stimulate new design principles on radio access networks (RAN). Advanced functional splits are then introduced to divide baseband unit (BBU) into two new entities, i.e., distributed unit (DU) and central unit (CU), that DU-CU can be co-located or separated into different processing pools (PP) honoring service requirements. Then, the optical transport network evolves towards a more flexible architecture to support agile DU-CU deployment (i.e., alterable DU-CU locations). However, this agile DU-CU deployment without an effective management strategy may lead to the activation of many unnecessary PPs and lightpaths in the network infrastructure that results in low energy efficiency. Moreover, this problem will be continuously amplified with network scale expansion, which becomes one of the operator's major concerns for OPEX reduction. Thus, in this paper, we are dedicated to solving this problem through turning network devices from “always on” to “on-demand on” pattern to support energy-efficient DU-CU deployment and lightpath provisioning. To this end, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and auxiliary graph-based heuristic to minimize the power consumption of reconfigurable add/drop multiplexer, Ethernet switch, optical transponder, PP, and DU-CU processor. We analyze the power consumption under different 5G services (i.e., eMBB, URLLC, and mMTC) from a latency perspective in both small-scale and large-scale networks. Moreover, our strategies can also be applied with adjustable deployment that adapts to time-varying user traffics, which reduces power by over 14% compared to conventional static deployment. Our analyses can help provide insights into the modeling and designing of energy-efficient DU-CU deployment and lightpath provisioning in 5G.