Open RAN, Congestion control and scheduling, optimization, flow management
Abstract :
[en] To enable an intelligent, programmable and multi-vendor radio access network (RAN) for 6G networks, considerable efforts have been made in standardization and development of open RAN (O-RAN). So far, however, the applicability of O-RAN in controlling and optimizing RAN functions has not been widely investigated. In this paper, we jointly optimize the flow-split distribution, congestion control and scheduling (JFCS) to enable an intelligent traffic steering application in O-RAN. Combining tools from network utility maximization and stochastic optimization, we introduce a multi-layer optimization framework that provides fast convergence, long-term utility-optimality and significant delay reduction compared to the state-of-the-art and baseline RAN approaches. Our main contributions are three-fold: i ) we propose the novel JFCS framework to efficiently and adaptively direct traffic to appropriate radio units; ii ) we develop low-complexity algorithms based on the reinforcement learning, inner approximation and bisection search methods to effectively solve the JFCS problem in different time scales; and iii ) the rigorous theoretical performance results are analyzed to show that there exists a scaling factor to improve the tradeoff between delay and utility-optimization. Collectively, the insights in this work will open the door towards fully automated networks with enhanced control and flexibility. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of the convergence rate, long-term utility-optimality and delay reduction.
Disciplines :
Electrical & electronics engineering
Author, co-author :
Nguyen, Van-Dinh ; College of Engineering and Computer Science and also with Center for Environmental Intelligence VinUniversity, Vinhomes Ocean Park, Hanoi, Vietnam
VU, Thang Xuan ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SigCom
Nguyen, Nhan Thanh ; Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, P.O.Box 4500, Finland
Nguyen, Dinh C. ; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA
Juntti, Markku; Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, P.O.Box 4500, Finland