HyCell: Enabling GREEN base station operations in software-defined radio access networks

Abstract

Abstract-The radio access networks (RANs) need to support massive and diverse data traffic with limited spectrum and energy. To cope with this challenge, software-defined radio access network (SDRAN) architectures have been proposed to renovate the RANs. However, current researches lack the design and evaluation of network protocols. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting the protocol design and evaluation of hyper-cellular networks (HyCell), an SDRAN framework making base station (BS) operations globally resource-optimized and energy-efficient (GREEN). Specifically, we first propose a separation scheme to realize the decoupled air interface in HyCell. Then we design a BS dispatching protocol which determines and assigns the optimal BS for serving mobile users, and a BS sleeping protocol to improve the network energy efficiency. Finally, we evaluate the proposed design in our HyCell testbed. Our evaluation validates the feasibility of the proposed separation scheme, demonstrates the effectiveness of BS dispatching, and shows great potential in energy saving through BS sleeping control.

HSDRAN: Hierarchical Software-Defined Radio Access Network for Distributed Optimization

“…While they optimize different aspects of SDRAN, they do not address the intrinsic scalability issue and overhead that come with the fully centralized architecture. Other problems studied include security [15], edge caching [8], [39], green networking [41], etc.…”

A survey on energy efficiency in software defined networks

“…Authors in [63] introduce a Hyper-Cellular network protocol called HyCell, which is an example of green software-defined radio access networks (SDRAN) with energy efficient base station (BS) operations. HyCell decouples control and traffic coverage, and manages them using BSs, Control BSs (CBSs), and Traffic BSs (TBSs).…”

System design and software-defined implementation for hyper-cellular network

“…基于此, 将云计算技术和虚拟化技术引入到分离架构中, 提出软件定义超蜂窝架构 (softwaredefined hyper-cellular architecture, SDHCA) [15] . 图 10 Figure 10 (Color online) Schematic diagram of software defined cellular architecture [15] 拟基站可以是已有蜂窝标准协议栈的实现, 也可以是包括控制基站和虚拟业务基站在内的新型基站. 蜂窝系统的核心网元也可以用虚拟化的软件应用实现, 即虚拟核心网 (virtual core network, VCN).…”