Dynamic Provisioning for High Energy Efficiency and Resource Utilization in Cloud RANs

Current Distributed Radio Access Network (DRAN) architectures, 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 demand as well as the electromagnetic interference caused by the high band reuse, making them inadequate to support the ever-increasing users´ data-rate requests. Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is a new centralized paradigm based on virtualization that has emerged as a promising architecture to address efficiently such fluctuations. C-RAN provides high energy efficiency and resource utilization across Software Defined Wireless Networks (SDWNs). A novel reconfigurable solution based on C-RAN is proposed to adapt dynamically and efficiently to fluctuations in per-user capacity demand. A real-time test bed is used to compare the proposed dynamic provisioning solution against the traditional static approach.