Defining Framework for Elasticity Management of Radio Controllers in Cloud

Cloud computing has come a long way over the last years and technologies using cloud computing are increasing at rates never experienced before. Cloud computing is attractive because of its efficiency, convenience and per-service business model. It does not come as a surprise when the telecom vendors of the world have realized this as a new source of revenue in the ever so demanding telecom business. Hence, initiatives are being taken to virtualize not only the latest technologies such as 5G, but also the existing technologies, namely 4G, 3G and 2G. In order to survive in a competitive and fast moving world, telecom equipment vendors have to differentiate the benefits that operators would get through this transition. And one of the most important benefits is ease of scalability. In a broad sense, scalability itself opens a new range of avenues where the operator can benefit from temporarily shutting down resources when usage is low and starting them up again when resource demand is on the rise. In order to cope with such requirements, there is a massive architectural change required in the software of legacy network elements before they can be moved to cloud. This paper focuses on the elasticity management procedures in the second generation Base Station Controller in Telco Cloud. This is one of the most legacy technologies of the telecom network elements and therefore also the most difficult one in terms of transitioning to the cloud. There are many operators still utilizing the wide base of Global System for Mobile services and many other operators who plan to keep Global System for Mobile networks live for at least five more years. Moreover, half of the world’s population, majority being in the developing countries, still uses basic cellular services on 2G networks. In the developed world, there are operators in Europe, who plan to shutdown 3G network services while leaving the 2G networks for Machine-to-Machine communication. Hence, there is a genuine customer need to virtualize such legacy network elements in the cloud. Even though this thesis focuses on elasticity procedures for the 2nd generation Base Station Controller, the generic principles of graceful shutdown and radio network reallocation discussed in this paper can also be applied to radio controllers of other technologies such as 3G and 4G