FlexVRAN: A Flexible Controller for Virtualized RAN Over Heterogeneous Deployments
Robert Schmidt, Chia‐Yu Chang, Navid Nikaein · 2019
Alongside the mobile network evolution toward the fifth generation (5G) era, it is expected that the radio access network (RAN) will be the most challenging technology domain to serve multiple service requirements. Specifically, three critical aspects are particularly emphasized: (i) heterogeneous RAN deployments, (ii) RAN functional splits between disaggregated entities, and (iii) sliced RAN for multiple services. To synthesize these three different aspects, a unified and customizable control framework is needed to serve both needs of infrastructure provider and slice owner. To this end, we propose the FlexVRAN control framework as an extension to our previous work to provide a two-level abstraction scheme between the underlying physical infrastructures, logical base stations (BSs), and slice-specific virtual BSs. We present a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed FlexVRAN over the OpenAirInterface (OAI) and FlexRAN platforms, and the evaluation results show the applicability and feasibility of software-defined RAN control over heterogeneous deployments in support of network slicing.