Joint Functional Split and Resource Allocation in 5G Cloud-RAN

5G radio access networks are expected to leverage the Cloud environment for building a cost effective network infrastructure. Advanced mechanisms with functional split are introduced to split the RAN functionalities into centralized and distributed locations. This novelty has brought more flexibility to RAN deployment but is still conditioned to the radio resource availability. In this paper, we propose a new orchestration framework for joint radio and functional split scheme on user basis. Specifically, we address the orchestration of heterogeneous resources in a multi-sited Cloud-RAN infrastructure. The key idea behind our proposal is to optimize jointly the functional split and End-to-End resource allocation in order to achieve an enhanced throughput satisfaction and a low deployment cost. Results show that our approach E2E-US optimizes the heterogeneous resource usage. Indeed, the appropriate user radio load and functional split are dynamically and jointly selected, which outperforms cell centric functional split approaches.