Minimizing Power Consumption by Joint Radio and Computing Resource Allocation in Cloud-RAN

International audienceCloud-RAN is a key 5G-enabler; it consists in centralizing the baseband processing of base stations by executing the baseband functions in a centralized, virtualized, and shared entity known as the Base Band Unit (BBU)-Pool. Cloud-RAN paves the way for joint management of the resources of multiple base stations. This paper aims to analyze the potential reduction in power consumption brought by the joint allocation of the radio and computing resources. We formulate a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem, considering the objective of power consumption minimization. For comparison, we consider the objective of throughput maximization. When the goal is power minimization, the joint allocation can minimize the total power consumption by up to 21.2%, with respect to the case where radio and computing resources in the BBU pool are allocated sequentially