Towards Disaggregated Resilient 5G Radio Access Network: A Proof of Concept

Abstract

Smart living applications represent a significant group of 5G vertical use cases. For the most part, these use cases require mobile network connectivity and service high-availability. Simply put, two essential requirements for these applications are short connection time and uninterrupted user data service. Coupled with the expectation of supporting billions of connected devices, these requirements can be achieved by exploiting New Generation Radio Access Network (NG-RAN) architectures. One such emerging architecture is Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN), whose Next Generation NodeB (gNB) functions are physically decoupled into distinct entities, such as Radio Unit (RU), Distributed Unit (DU), and Central Unit (CU). The CUs are connected to 5G Core Network (CN) and are likely to be virtualized and distributed across multiple (micro and macro) data centers. The virtualized CUs (vCUs) are further decoupled into virtualized CU Control-Plane (vCU-CP) and virtualized CU User-Plane (vCU-UP) to increase flexibility and scalability. As these 5G RAN entities are virtualized, various resiliency schemes, such as container migration, must be considered to overcome possible congestion in or malfunction of the hosting server.In this paper, two distinct cloud-native RAN resiliency scenarios are evaluated while live-migrating gNB-vCU-CP with the objective of maintaining User Equipment (UE) connection time short and user data service uninterrupted in support of smart living and other advanced applications.