Development of a Cloud-enabled “Small Cell as a Service” concept, for Multi-Tenancy and Edge Services in the 5G Framework

• Wednesday, 14 June 2017, 11:00-12:30, Room Radisson Blu Nuotta&Luoto
• Session Chairs: Ioannis Chochliouros (OTE, Greece), Leonardo Goratti (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy), Ioannis Giannoulakis (NCSR Demokritos, Greece), Oriol Sallent (UPC, Spain)

The Small Cell (SC) concept has become fundamental in today’s 4G access and is much more promising for an effective development of the forthcoming 5G concept. SCs offer multiple benefits for all involved “actors”; they provide improved cellular coverage, capacity and applications for homes and enterprises (for both dense/metropolitan and rural public spaces), while they are critical for offering services in populated areas (i.e., stadiums, shopping-malls, concert venues and places with tactic/sporadic high end-user density). In such cases, each telecom operator deploys their own infrastructure, acting “complementary” to the macro-cell network, but also implying for a considerable number of time-/money-consuming procedures (e.g., provisioning of installation site, power supply, etc.). Operators must also face the costs of establishing dedicated, high-capacity backhaul connections, not to mention radio resource management and interference mitigation techniques, all translating to remarkable extra costs and efforts. However, this “static” approach based on the ownership of the physical SC infrastructure not only increases operators’ CAPEX and hampers business agility, but also cannot “cope” with dynamic scenarios (e.g., sporadic flash crowd events, resulting in traffic overflow and signal outage). In order to “address” this critical need and to build upon the pillars of network functions virtualisation, mobile-edge computing and cognitive management, the EU-funded 5G-PPP research project SESAME focuses upon the development and testing of an innovative architecture, by providing SC coverage to multiple operators “as a Service”. SESAME envisages the logical partitioning of the localised SC network to multiple isolated slices and their provision to several tenants. Moreover, along with virtualising and partitioning SC capacity, SESAME supports enhanced multi-tenant edge cloud services by enriching SCs with micro-servers. Consequently, SESAME becomes able to “promote” innovative concepts for modern 5G development with the effective and beneficial inclusion of new features like NFV management, virtualisation of management views per tenant, “Self-x” features and radio-access management techniques, together with the creation of a multitude of business opportunities for market players in the value chain.