Creating Tailored and Adaptive Network Services with the Open Orchestration C-RAN Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces OOCRAN, an open-source framework extending NFV management to include radio layers, enabling dynamic, tailored network service deployment in next-generation wireless networks.

Contribution

The paper presents OOCRAN, a novel open-source framework that integrates radio communication management with NFV orchestration for flexible network service creation.

Findings

OOCRAN effectively monitors and manages resources for tailored network services.

It automates network service reconfiguration and supports user control.

Demonstrated dynamic deployment of cellular network services.

Abstract

Next generation wireless communications networks will leverage software-defined radio and networking technologies, combined with cloud and fog computing. A pool of resources can then be dynamically allocated to create personalized network services (NSs). The enabling technologies are abstraction, virtualization and consolidation of resources, automatization of processes, and programmatic provisioning and orchestration. ETSI's network functions virtualization (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO) framework provides the architecture and specifications of the management layers. We introduce OOCRAN, an open-source software framework and testbed that extends existing NFV management solutions by incorporating the radio communications layers. This paper presents OOCRAN and illustrates how it monitors and manages the pool of resources for creating tailored NSs. OOCRAN can automate NS reconfiguration, but also facilitates user control. We demonstrate the dynamic deployment of cellular NSs and discuss the challenges of dynamically creating and managing tailored NSs on shared infrastructure.