A Shared-Path Shared-Compute Planning Strategy for a Resilient Hybrid C-RAN

One key challenge in 5G networks is to guarantee the survivability of services in the event of failures. This paper focuses on the hybrid cloud radio access network (H-CRAN) architecture. The proposed strategy guarantees survivability in the presence of failures affecting nodes/links in the midhaul segment (i.e., connecting the radio aggregation unit (RAU) nodes to their respective radio cloud center (RCC) nodes) as well as compute resources (i.e., servers) in the RCC nodes. In the envisioned strategy each RAU node is connected to a primary and a backup RCC node (i.e., with backup compute resources) via two node disjoint connectivity paths in the midhaul. The proposed strategy, called Shared-Path Shared-Compute Planning (SPSCP), lowers the overall design cost by trying to share as much as possible backup connectivity and compute resources among RAU nodes. This is made possible by introducing a shareability metric early into the RCC node selection process so that the chance of sharing backup resources is maximized. Simulation results show that the SPSCP strategy can lead to up to 28% cost savings when compared to conventional resilient design strategies.