Performance evaluation of NETCONF-based low latency cross-connect for 5G C-RAN architectures

The development of 5G wireless technology is in progress looking to cope with the increasing demands for high capacity, low latency, and ubiquitous mobile access. Cloud/Centralized Radio Access Networks (C-RAN) has been proposed as a promising approach to address the 5G benchmarks. C-RAN is a rising mobile network architecture based on the centralization and pooling of baseband processing elements, with the scope of increasing resource utilization efficiency and air-interface performance gains with fast scaling multi-cell coordination. In this paper we focus on proposing and evaluating a flexible low-latency cross-connect (XC) switch that allows a dynamic scheduling of networking resources between baseband units (BBUs) and remote radio heads (RRHs) in C-RAN deployments. On the one hand, we develop a control plane mechanism for manipulating the XC configuration and state data based on a custom YANG model and Network Configuration (NTCONF) protocol. Using a standard open NETCONF interface, automation of heterogeneous C-RAN resource assignment can be facilitated for 5G architectures. Secondly, we evaluate the performance of our XC in relation to the C-RAN stringent requirements and show that the latency and jitter introduced have negligible influence compared to radio interface limits. The impact of switching delay on the performance of a live system has yet to be tested however, a measured average switching time of 252 ms could still disrupt the ongoing connections.