TRANSPARENT RAN SHARING OF 5G SMALL CELLS AND MACROCELLS

Abstract

To cope with the growth of mobile data traffic in 5G systems, telecom operators have to set up more small cells and macrocells in the same area. However, because of space limitations, it is difficult for each operator to do so, and RAN sharing would thus become mandatory for 5G systems. In this work, RANP is proposed, which will achieve transparent RAN sharing by setting up RANP between a base station to be shared and multiple core networks. Over and above the general one-level proxy architecture, an extended two-level architecture is proposed that will share both small cells and macrocells. According to our emulation results, additional packet processing time of a RANP is about 2 ms, 3.8 percent of the total end-to-end latency. Its impact on throughput is about 3 percent and can be regarded as irrelevant.