Incoming Traffic Control of Fronthaul in 5G Mobile Network for Massive Multimedia Services

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is composed of optical networks and is known to a fronthaul network. In the fronthaul network, remote radio heads (RRHs) connect to a baseband processing unit (BBU) and BBUs connect to the BBU pool in the 5G core network. Multimedia traffic in radio is transmitted to the core network through the fronthaul network. Although the fronthaul is an optical network, bandwidth of the fronthaul is insufficient for mobile multimedia services because mobile multimedia services are based on large amounts of data. Therefore, it is necessary to control the bandwidth usage in the fronthaul. In 5G mobile networks, RRHs can use a mobile edge computing (MEC) server as an edge cloud and can perform complicated operations in the MEC using knowledge of fronthaul. The proposed method controls incoming traffic to the fronthaul network using knowledge according to the network condition in the fronthaul. When the bandwidth of the fronthaul becomes full due to a large amount of traffic, incoming traffic to the fronthaul network is controlled. The MEC server acts as a buffer for incoming multimedia traffic. Through the proposed method, transmission efficiency for massive multimedia traffic in the fronthaul can be improved. The performance is validated through computer simulation.