A C-RAN Architecture for LTE Control Signalling

The current LTE network architecture experiences high level of signalling traffic between control plane entities. As a result many innovative architectures have been proposed including SDN to simplify the network. Cloud RAN on the other hand proposes a pioneering paradigm in terms of sustaining the profitability margin with unprecedented surge of mobile traffic and providing better performance to the end users. Schemes have been proposed to compute and analyse the signalling load in the new SDN LTE architecture; however in our best understanding, none of them consider future CRAN architectures. Thus in this paper we propose a new SDN CRAN architecture and present an analysis of the signalling load, evaluate the performance and compare it against existing architectures in the literature. Evaluation results show significant improvement of the proposed schemes in terms of reduction in the signalling load when addressing several network metrics.