A strategy for joint service offloading and scheduling in heterogeneous cloud radio access networks

Abstract

Cloud radio access network is one of the most promising cellular networks for the next generation of mobile networks. The basic idea of cloud RAN (radio access network) is virtualizing and centralizing the intelligent part of the base station, the base band unit, and keeping remote radio heads on cell site enabling a centralized processing and management. Offloading data computation to edge cloud was proposed as a solution to deal with resource limitation while keeping a good quality of service. In this paper, we propose a strategy to jointly handle offloading decision and offloading request scheduling in cloud RAN. We aim to improve network quality of service while reducing the scheduling cost expressed in terms of overload, network delay, and migration cost. Numerical results show that the proposed approach is able to reduce the response time of the applications, mobile terminal energy consumption, and total execution cost.