A Green Video Control Plane with Fixed-Mobile Convergence and Cloud-RAN

Video traffic is a key-challenge for fixed and mobile operators facing variable and massive load and variety of Over- The-Top (OTT) videos. Energy consumption is also a heavy Opex component, where the Fixed-Mobile Convergence is a promising solution, built on on economical optic fibers and LTE baseband operations consolidation. By combining Future Internet Architectures (FIA) principles such as ubiquitous caching, SDN and NFV, and FMC, we propose a complete, fully dynamic setup which optimizes both for power consumption and Quality of Experience (QoE), by choosing proper infrastructure (turning on a minimum number of computing and networking equipments) and operational (routing and caching) configurations. Our control plane named ViRCA is scalable thanks to data analytics techniques, and fully reactive to the dynamics of load and catalog both in time and space. Numerical assessments in realistic settings show power gains of up to 30% while the scores on different QoE metrics are maximized. Enabling elastic co-location of caches and radio base-band operations turns out to be crucial for both power and QoE objectives.