Abstract
The global connected cars market is growing rapidly. Novel services will be offered to vehicles, many of them requiring low-latency and high-reliability networking solutions. The Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) paradigm, thanks to the centralization and virtualization of baseband functions, offers numerous advantages in terms of costs and mobile radio performance. C-RAN can be deployed in conjunction with a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) infrastructure, bringing services close to vehicles supporting time-critical applications. However, a massive deployment of computational resources at the edge may be costly, especially when reliability requirements demand deployment of redundant resources. In this context, cost optimization based on integer linear programming may result in being too complex when the number of involved nodes is more than a few tens. This paper proposes a scalable approach for C-RAN and MEC computational resource deployment with protection against single-edge node failure. A two-step hybrid model is proposed to alleviate the computational complexity of the integer programming model when edge computing resources are located in physical nodes. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid strategy in finding optimal or near-optimal solutions with different network sizes and with affordable computational effort.
Highlights
Connected vehicles can provide a large set of services for smarter and safer mobility
This paper proposes an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to solve the joint deployment problem of baseband processing and edge computing with reliability against single-node failure in Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN)
Numerical results are obtained in different networks to evaluate the effectiveness of the ILP and hybrid solutions in terms of active edge nodes and of the centralization gain, GC, that is the advantage related to centralizing baseband units (BBUs) and cloud functionalities, expressed by the following formula: GC
Summary
Connected vehicles can provide a large set of services for smarter and safer mobility. SDN can, provide suitable control and management support to optimally locate virtualized network functionalities to intelligent nodes in the cost and power efficiency perspectives. This is of particular importance when considering highly dynamic and performance-constrained contexts as happens in 5G networking. Virtualized baseband functionalities are suitably located and centralized in the nodes of the optical transport network implementing a C-RAN for enhanced functionality and cost-optimization purposes [7]. The nodes hosting these pooled virtual baseband units (BBUs) are called BBU hotels.
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