Resilient BBU placement in 5G C-RAN over optical aggregation networks

The huge data demand envisioned for the 5G requires radical changes in the mobile network architecture and technology. Centralized radio access network (C-RAN) is introduced as a novel mobile network architecture, designed to effectively support the challenging requirements of the future 5G mobile networks. In C-RAN, BaseBand Units (BBUs) are physically separated from their corresponding radio remote heads (RRHs) and located in a central single physical location called BBU pool. The RRHs are connected to the BBU pool via the so-called fronthaul network. The “centralization” demonstrates remarkable benefits in terms of computational resources as well as power savings. Following this centralization, designing a survivable C-RAN becomes crucial as BBU pool and link failures might cause service outage for large number of users. In this paper, we propose three different approaches for the survivable BBU pool placement problem and traffic routing in C-RAN deployment over a 5G optical aggregation network. Namely, we define the following protection scenarios: (1) dedicated path protection, (2) dedicated BBU protection and (3) dedicated BBU and path protection. The three approaches are formalized as integer linear programming (ILP) problems. The ILPs objectives are to minimize the number of BBU pools, the number of used wavelengths and the baseband processing computational resources, in terms of giga operations per second. We provide numerical results to compare the aforementioned protection strategies considering different network topologies. The results show the effect of the latency and the transport–network capacity on the BBU placement. We show the trade-off between the centralization degree and the tight latency requirements. Moreover, we discuss important insights about considering the different objective functions for each protection approach.