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 cloud-enabled 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.
Highlights
In the framework of evolved 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) and future 5G mobile network architectures, different proposals are emerging aimed at overcoming the capacity limitations of current Radio Access Networks (RANs)
This paper presents a solution for the inclusion of mobile edge services in scenarios where an aggregation of small cells is able to share certain processing and storage resources in a local perspective
Rather than centralising RAN and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) functions into big data centres, the proposed solution creates a distributed light data centre by coordinating the microservers associated to different small cells in a cluster
Summary
In the framework of evolved 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) and future 5G mobile network architectures, different proposals are emerging aimed at overcoming the capacity limitations of current Radio Access Networks (RANs). This second option envisages the deployment of a series of HW resources with limited capacity and requirements and in a distributed configuration, which may ideally collaborate to provide some edge computing capabilities This second solution is especially relevant to enable flexible deployment of Small Cells, and attractive for targeting currently deployed network architectures and special limited-access scenarios. In the former case, a Small Cell operator may think about endowing its deployed network with novel mobile edge capabilities by gradually upgrading the Customer-Premises Equipments (CPE) without requiring changing wired connections. Some of the key aspects related to this paper are the possibility of using geo-distributed data centres and the associated challenges [11] and the introductions of mobile cloud computing [12] and fog computing principles [13]
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