Resilient and Energy Efficient DU-CU-MEC Deployments for Service Oriented Reliable Next Generation Metro Access Network

Virtualization architecture with split baseband functions has received much attention from researchers and industries to provide a more flexible radio access network (RAN) to satisfy the new emerging diverse use cases including ultra-reliable low latency communication (uRLLC), enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). It divides functions aggregated in the active antenna unit and baseband unit into three more specific modules, including radio unit(RU), distributed unit (DU), and centralized unit (CU). Although this architecture helps vendors provide more flexible deployment selections in response to the diversity of NG network traffic, it raises a new problem regarding the highly timely manner of DU, CU, and MEC deployment management to realize on-time service, less power consumption and backup paths for higher reliability. In this paper, with the objective to minimize the power consumption of the next-generation RAN architecture, we formulate a complete mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and a heuristic DCMH to optimize the baseband module deployment for both working and backup paths in the access network. The proposed solution is verified on a real deployed testbed in Bristol port. Results show that DCMH can realize similar performance as complete MILP. In addition, the longer idle time is, the more energy DCMH can save compared to keeping processing pools on standby. The project helps users get better services and operators save future RAN update costs.