Optical networking interconnecting disaggregated compute resources: An enabler of the 5G vision

This paper focuses on converged optical-wireless 5G infrastructures and proposes the novel concept of “Dis-Aggregated RAN” (DA-RAN) as an alternative to the RAN and C-RAN solutions. DA-RAN adopts the concept of “disaggregation” of hardware and software components across the wireless, optical and compute/storage domains. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through a service provisioning model that takes into consideration both the description of the heterogeneous 5G network and the processor details within the BBUs. Modeling results show significant benefits in terms of power consumption that range between 10–50%