Evaluation of energy and cost savings in mobile Cloud RAN

The load in mobile networks is subject to variations during the day, due to user mobility and varying network average usage. Therefore, the traditional or Distributed Radio Access Network (D-RAN) architecture, where the BaseBand processing Units (BBUs) are assigned statically to a number of cells, is sub optimal, comparing to a novel, cloud based architecture called Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). In C-RAN a group of cells shares processing resources, and hence benefit from statistical multiplexing gain is expected. In this paper, the energy and cost savings in C-RAN are evaluated numerically using OPNET Modeler. A real case scenario is built upon the mobile traffic forecast for year 2017, a number of recommendations on traffic models and a proposed C-RAN implementation. The results achieved show that the maximum statistical multiplexing gain for user plane traffic in C-RAN architecture is 4 compared to a traditional and D-RAN architecture.