A Proposal for Hybrid SDN C-RAN Architectures for Enhancing Control Signaling under Mobility
Imad Al-Samman, Angela Doufexi, Mark A Beach · 2016
The vast growth in mobile data traffic requires future mobile network infrastructure to support fast overall growing mobile devices while improving the cost and the energy efficiencies. Many recent studies in this context have focused on proposing solutions for end-to-end architectural designs based on flexible allocations of functions, network function virtualization and software-defined implementations (SDN). It's also of upmost importance to introduce a 5G End-to-End architecture that support low latency RAN with joint design of programmable and software's driven networks that can adapt dynamically to the fluctuating traffic demands. This study contributes in this area by providing innovative joint Cloud-RAN-SDN network designs which are expected to reduce operational cost and overall control signaling load. The paper proposes two architectural schemes called C-RAN.C-MME and C-RAN.D-MME. We demonstrate the associated signaling load analysis, evaluate the performance and compare it against existing literature architectures. Evaluation results indicate a substantial improvement in terms of reducing the signaling load taking into account several network metrics. It's worth mentioning that this study shows the impact of the proposed architectures on the signaling plane only, while their benefits for the transmission/data planes is considered in future work.