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Energy-Efficient Orchestration of Metro-Scale 5G Radio Access Networks

Published: 10 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

RAN energy consumption is a major OPEX source for mobile telecom operators, and 5G is expected to increase these costs by several folds. Moreover, paradigm-shifting aspects of the 5G RAN architecture like RAN disaggregation, virtualization and cloudification introduce new traffic-dependent resource management decisions that make the problem of energy-efficient 5G RAN orchestration harder. To address such a challenge, we present a first comprehensive virtualized RAN (vRAN) system model aligned with 5G RAN specifications, which embeds realistic and dynamic models for computational load and energy consumption costs. We then formulate the vRAN energy consumption optimization as an integer quadratic programming problem, whose NP-hard nature leads us to develop GreenRAN, a novel, computationally efficient and distributed solution that leverages Lagrangian decomposition and simulated annealing. Evaluations with real-world mobile traffic data for a large metropolitan area are another novel aspect of this work, and show that our approach yields energy efficiency gains up to 25% and 42%, over state-of-the-art and baseline traditional RAN approaches, respectively.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Characterizing and Modeling Session-Level Mobile Traffic Demands from Large-Scale MeasurementsProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624825(696-709)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Taking 5G RAN Analytics and Control to a New LevelProceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3570361.3592493(1-16)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
  • (2023)The Path Towards Virtualized Wireless Communications: A Survey and Research ChallengesJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-023-09788-332:1Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023

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              IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
              May 2021
              2503 pages

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              Published: 10 May 2021

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              View all
              • (2023)Characterizing and Modeling Session-Level Mobile Traffic Demands from Large-Scale MeasurementsProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624825(696-709)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
              • (2023)Taking 5G RAN Analytics and Control to a New LevelProceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3570361.3592493(1-16)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
              • (2023)The Path Towards Virtualized Wireless Communications: A Survey and Research ChallengesJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-023-09788-332:1Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023

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