Elastic-Net: Boosting Energy Efficiency and Resource Utilization in 5G C-RANs

Current Distributed Radio Access Networks (DRANs), which are characterized by a static configuration and deployment of Base Stations (BSs), have exposed their limitations in handling the temporal and geographical fluctuations of capacity demands. At the same time, each BS's spectrum and computing resources are only used by the active users in the cell range, causing idle BSs in some areas/times and overloaded BSs in other areas/times. Recently, Cloud Radio Access Network (CRAN) has been introduced as a new centralized paradigm for wireless cellular networks in which—through virtualization—the BSs are physically decoupled into Virtual Base Stations (VBSs) and Remote Radio Heads (RRHs). In this paper, a novel elastic framework aimed at fully exploiting the potential of C-RAN is proposed, which is able to adapt to the fluctuation in capacity demand while at the same time maximizing the energy efficiency and resource utilization. Simulation and testbed experiment results are presented to illustrate the performance gains of the proposed elastic solution against the current static deployment.