Survivable Task Allocation in Cloud Radio Access Networks With Mobile-Edge Computing

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a promising 5G network architecture by establishing baseband units (BBU) pools to perform baseband processing functionalities and deploying remote radio heads (RRHs) for wireless signal transmission and reception. Mobile-edge computing (MEC) offers a way to shorten the service delay by building small-scale cloud infrastructures at the network edge. By co-locating the BBU pool with edge cloud at the so-called BBU node, we can take full advantages of C-RAN and MEC for better spectrum utilization and delay-guaranteed services. In this article, we first study how to allocate each users task to the BBU node and find the path from his/her accessing RRH node to the BBU node such that the maximum service delay among all the requests is minimized. We then consider this problem with survivability concerns, which is to use both primary and backup BBU nodes to issue the request such that the primary path and backup path are link disjoint. We analyze the complexities of these two problems and prove they are NP-hard in general. Subsequently, we devise a randomized approximation algorithm and an efficient heuristic to solve the considered problems, respectively. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform two benchmark heuristics in terms of acceptance ratio and maximum service delay.

Automated summary

The combination of C-RAN and MEC can improve spectrum utilization and delay-guaranteed services, shortening service delays by co-locating the BBU pool with edge cloud at the BBU node. Research has focused on user task allocation, path planning, and survivability concerns, proving the NP-hardness of these issues.