Communication and Computing Integrated RAN: A New Paradigm Shift for Mobile Network

The Radio Access Network (RAN) consists of numerous base stations that serve as access points for the end users to communicate with application services. Along with the increasingly powerful computing capability in base stations, and the stringent requirements from new services exemplified by augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), it is realistic and desirable to leverage the spare computing resource in the base stations to deploy such latency sensitive services. This concept, named Communication and Computing Integrated RAN (CCIR), is proposed in this article. CCIR is aimed to providing communication service and computing service in a holistic manner. This article presents design principles, logical architecture, and key enabling technologies of CCIR. Field trials on the computing resource migration among different base stations are conducted to demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of CCIR. It is observed that the system performance is improved in terms of spectral efficiency and throughput due to the holistic orchestration and scheduling in CCIR.