Evaluating Energy-Efficient Cloud Radio Access Networks for 5G

Next-generation cellular networks such as fifth-generation (5G) will experience tremendous growth in traffic. To accommodate such traffic demand, there is a necessity to increase the network capacity that eventually requires the deployment of more base stations (BSs). Nevertheless, BSs are very expensive and consume a significant amount of energy. Meanwhile, cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) has been proposed as an energy-efficient architecture that leverages cloud computing technology where baseband processing is performed in the cloud, i.e., the computing servers or baseband processing units (BBUs) are located in the cloud. With such an arrangement, more energy saving gains can be achieved by reducing the number of BBUs used. This paper proposes a bin packing scheme with three variants such as First-fit (FT), First-fit decreasing (FFD) and Next-fit (NF) for minimizing energy consumption in 5G C-RAN. The number of BBUs are reduced by matching the right amount of baseband computing load with traffic load. In the proposed scheme, BS traffic items that are mapped into processing requirements, are to be packed into computing servers, called bins, such that the number of bins used are minimized and idle servers can then be switched off to save energy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed bin packing scheme achieves an enhanced energy performance compared to the existing distributed BS architecture.