A Green Video Control Plane with Fixed-Mobile Convergence and Cloud-RAN

Description

Video traffic is a key-challenge for fixed and mobile operators facing variable and massive load and variety of Over- The-Top (OTT) videos. Energy consumption is also a heavy Opex component, where the Fixed-Mobile Convergence is a promising solution, built on on economical optic fibers and LTE base- band operations consolidation. By combining Future Internet Architectures (FIA) principles such as ubiquitous caching, SDN and NFV, and FMC, we propose a complete, fully dynamic setup which optimizes both for power consumption and Quality of Experience (QoE), by choosing proper infrastructure (turning on a minimum number of computing and networking equipments) and operational (routing and caching) configurations. Our control plane named ViRCA is scalable thanks to data analytics tech- niques, and fully reactive to the dynamics of load and catalog both in time and space. Numerical assessments in realistic settings show power gains of up to 30% while the scores on different QoE metrics are maximized. Enabling elastic co-location of caches and radio base-band operations turns out to be crucial for both power and QoE objectives.

Abstract

International audience

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