Radio Resource Management Algorithms for Implementation in Radio Unit Sharing Systems

Radio Access Network (RAN) sharing between different multiple Mobile Network Operators (MNO) has attracted much attention in recent years for its benefits of low deployment cost and network capability. The authors focus on Radio Unit (RU) and Front Haul (FH) sharing because of acceptable solution with small deployment cost. In this paper, we study about radio resource management with FH capacity restriction and Distributed Unit (DU) computing resource restriction on the condition that Dedicated RUs (DRU), which are individually installed by MNO, replaced with Shared RUs (SRU). In our proposed method, the system bandwidth of each MNO is divided into multiple frequency blocks (FB), and FB allocation patterns are optimized to maximize the Proportional Fairness Utility (PFU). Centralized Control (CC) method and Hierarchical Control (HC) method are proposed for implementation to RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), and they are evaluated via system level simulation. The results show that both methods can achieve higher median throughput than DRU systems by about two times. HC method can reduce the amount of information collected to shared RIC (SRIC) by dividing into inter MNO FB ratio optimization and intra MNO FB allocation pattern optimization.