Service Mapping and Orchestration Over Multi-Tenant Cloud-Enabled RAN

Abstract

Fifth-generation (5G) envisages a “hyper-connected society” where an enormous number of diverse entities could communicate with each other anywhere and at any time, some of which will demand extremely challenging performance requirements such as sub-millisecond latency, and higher data rates. Cloud-enabled radio access networks (CE-RANs) where intelligence is placed at the edge of the mobile network and in the proximity of end users emerge as a promising solution to improve online experience. To make CE-RAN more flexible and cost-effective, network functions virtualization and software defined networking technologies are employed, enabling features such as resource pooling, scalability, spectral efficiency, and multi tenancy. The accommodation of such technologies in the context of 5G requires multipronged efforts at various levels, in particular at the management and orchestration. Among all topics that falls into this subject, e.g., resource optimization and efficient lifecycle management, this paper focuses on two critical challenges, i.e., service mapping and quality of service assurance. Particularly, the proposed service placement solution takes into account two main constraints, i.e., quality of user experience and limited hardware capabilities available at the network edge. Simulation tools as well as the SESAME testbed have been used to extract results in this paper and a proof-of-concept evaluation is presented.