Open Orchestration Cloud Radio Access Network (OOCRAN) Testbed

TL;DR

This paper introduces OOCRAN, a software framework based on NFV MANO architecture, enabling dynamic orchestration of wireless infrastructure components including hardware, spectrum, and radio resources for flexible LTE small cell deployments.

Contribution

It extends NFV management frameworks to include radio communication layers, facilitating dynamic virtualized wireless network provisioning.

Findings

Demonstrated OOCRAN's operation in a real testbed.

Showcased dynamic LTE small cell network deployment.

Validated the orchestration of hardware and spectrum resources.

Abstract

The Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) offers a revolutionary approach to cellular network deployment, management and evolution. Advances in software-defined radio (SDR) and networking technology, moreover, enable delivering software-defined everything through the Cloud. Resources will be pooled and dynamically allocated leveraging abstraction, virtualization, and consolidation techniques; processes will be automated using common application programming interfaces; and network functions and services will be programmatically provided through an orchestrator. OOCRAN, oocran.dynu.com, is a software framework that is based on the NFV MANO architecture proposed by ETSI. It provides an orchestration layer for the entire wireless infrastructure, including hardware, software, spectrum, fronthaul and backhaul. OOCRAN extends existing NFV management frameworks by incorporating the radio communications layers and their management dependencies. The wireless infrastructure provider can then dynamically provision virtualized wireless networks to wireless service providers. The testbed's physical infrastructure is built around a computing cluster that executes open-source SDR libraries and connects to SDR-based remote radio heads. We demonstrate the operation of OOCRAN and discuss the temporal implications of dynamic LTE small cell network deployments.