Demonstration of dynamic resource sharing benefits in an optical C-RAN

The next generation of mobile communication (i.e., 5G) will bring new challenges for the transport infrastructure, e.g., in terms of flexibility and capacity. The joint orchestration of radio and transport resources can help to address some of these challenges. One example is the possibility of reconfiguring the use of the transport network resources according to the spatial and temporal variations of the wireless traffic patterns. Using the concept of dynamic resource sharing, a limited pool of transport resources can be shared among a large number of radio base stations (RBSs), thus reducing considerably the overall deployment cost of the transport infrastructure. This paper proposes a provisioning strategy for a centralized radio access network with an optical transport whose wavelength resources can be dynamically shared among multiple RBSs. The proposed strategy utilizes a hierarchical software-defined networking control plane where a global orchestrator optimizes the usage of radio and transport resources. The benefits of the proposed strategy are assessed both by simulation and by experiment via an optical data plane emulator developed for this purpose. It is shown that the dynamic resource sharing can save up to 31.4% of transport resources compared to a conventional dimensioning approach, i.e., based on the overprovi-sioning of wavelength resources.