Elastic Resource Utilization Framework for High Capacity and Energy Efficiency in Cloud RAN

Current radio access network architectures, characterized by a static configuration and deployment of base stations, have exposed their limitations in handling the temporal and geographical fluctuations of capacity demand. Moreover, small cell networks have exacerbated the problem of electromagnetic interference and decreased the energy efficiency. Although there are some solutions to alleviate these problems, they still suffer from static provisioning of BSs and lack of inter-BS communication. Cloud RAN is a new centralized paradigm based on virtualization technology that has emerged as a promising architecture and efficiently addresses such problems. C-RAN provides high energy efficiency together with gigabit-per-second data rates across software defined wireless networks. In this article, novel reconfigurable solutions based on C-RAN are proposed in order to adapt dynamically and efficiently to the fluctuations in per-user capacity demand. Co-location models for provisioning and allocation of virtual base stations are introduced, and pros and cons of different VBS architectures are studied. Also, the potential advantages of VBS clustering and consolidation to support recently proposed cooperative techniques like cooperative multipoint processing are discussed.