Dynamic Resource Allocation scheme for 5G Networks of Fronthaul-limited Shared Radio Units

Radio Access Network (RAN) sharing between multiple Mobile Network Operators (MNO) has attracted much attention in recent years for its benefits of low deployment cost and high network capability. Shared Radio Units (SRU) is considered one of the most acceptable RAN sharing methods to MNOs, since they don't have to modify their conventional control schemes by keeping independent Central Units (CU), Distributed Units (DU) and spectrum resources. However, increased interference may threat the quality of service of MNOs because the larger number of SRUs compared to those when each MNOs deploys its own dedicate RUs. In this paper, we propose a dynamic resource allocation scheme for 5G networks with SRUs, by which frequency band allocation and User Equipment (UE) association are optimized considering the capacity limitation of shared fronthaul networks. In order to evaluate our proposed method in a realistic environment, we construct a multi-agent based scenario where UEs' mobility and communication activities are simulated from those in a real shopping mall. Numerical simulation results with the comparison to the conventional dedicated RU scheme show that, our proposed scheme can achieve a throughput improvement of more than 40% in different traffic distributions, and its performance are robust to a control delay up to a few minutes.