Traffic-Aware Compute Resource Tuning for Energy Efficient Cloud RANs
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Abstract
For 5G networks, it is expected that most of the network functions will run as software components on operators' telco-cloud systems rather than using dedicated hardware components. C-RAN disaggregates the functionality of base stations into Central Unit (CU), Distributed Units (DU), and Radio Unit (RU) so that some of the radio processing tasks are centralized and virtualized on a pool of general-purpose processors on a cloud platform so that its computational resources could be utilized efficiently based on spatio-temporal traffic fluctuations at cell sites. 3GPP/O-RAN alliance defined various functional split architectures for 5G NR which differ in the functionality realized at CU/DU and offer many different deployment choices for reducing CAPEX/OPEX of the operators. In this work, a real-time C-RAN testbed built using OpenAirInterface (OAI) platform is used to profile the energy consumed by different functional splits by varying the CPU clock frequency and channel bandwidth. Based on the observations, a traffic-aware compute resource tuning (CRT) scheme is proposed to reduce the energy consumption of C-RANs. Another benefit of the CRT scheme is its ability to work with any MAC scheduler. The extensive results show how CRT outperforms the existing frequency scaling governors in energy consumption while reducing fronthaul bandwidth requirements.
Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma, IIT Hyderabad
Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma is a Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Hyderabad, India. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from IIT Madras, India in 2007 and then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) division of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) prior to taking up faculty position at IIT Hyderabad, India in 2010. His research interests are in the areas of Converged Cloud Radio Access Networks, SDN/NFV for 5G, V2X enabled Mobile Edge for Autonomous Navigation, Network Security, and Green ICT.