O-RAN for Energy-Efficient Serving Cluster Formulation in User-Centric Cell-Free MMIMO

2024-03-28

Conference on Computer Communications Workshops

AI Summary

To address the low energy efficiency in dynamic service cluster formation for user-centric cell-free massive MIMO (UCCF mMIMO) networks in 6G, this paper proposes an energy-efficient Service Cluster Formation (SCF) method built upon the O-RAN architecture. It pioneers the integration of O-RAN’s hardware-software decoupling and rApp-xApp collaborative orchestration capabilities into user-centric cluster decision-making, departing from conventional centralized and static clustering paradigms. A distributed service cluster optimization algorithm is developed, coupled with an energy-efficiency-driven access point (AP) selection strategy, enabling on-demand, low-overhead dynamic cluster reconfiguration. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves system energy efficiency by up to 37% compared to a representative centralized baseline, significantly enhancing network flexibility and sustainability.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Federated recommendation systems and personalization
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

The 6G Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MMIMO) networks can follow the so-called User-Centric Cell-Free (UCCF) architecture, where a single user is served by multiple Access Points (APs) coordinated by the Central Processing Unit (CPU). In this paper, we propose how O-RAN functionalities, i.e., rApp-xApp pair, can be used for energy-efficient Serving Cluster Formulation (SCF). Simulation studies show up to 37% gain in Energy Efficiency (EE) of the proposed solution over the state-of-the-art Network-Centric (NC) designs.

Problem

• Optimize energy efficiency in 6G MMIMO
• Implement O-RAN for serving cluster formulation
• Compare user-centric vs network-centric designs

Innovation

• O-RAN for energy efficiency
• User-Centric Cell-Free architecture
• Central Processing Unit coordination