Opportunistic fog computing for 5G radio access networks: A position paper

Abstract

Fog-based radio access networks (F-RAN) are posed to play a pivotal role in the much-anticipated 5th Generation (5G) cellular networks. The philosophy of F-RAN is to harness the distributed resources of collaborative edge devices to deliver localized RAN services to the end users. The current F-RAN is implemented mainly utilizing dedicated hardware and do not leverage on the available large number of distributed edge devices. This paper introduces the idea of opportunistic fog RAN (OF-RAN) which comprises of virtual fog access points (v-FAPs). The v-FAPs are formed opportunistically by one or more local edge devices also referred to as service nodes, such as WiFi access points, femtocell base stations and more resource rich end user devices under the coverage and management of the physical FAP, which can be dedicated fog server, fog-enabled remote radio heads (RRHs) or macrocell base stations. The proposed OF-RAN can be a low latency and high scalable solution for 5G cellular networks.