Experimental framework and evaluation of the 5G-Crosshaul Control Infrastructure

The goal of 5G-Crosshaul is to integrate fronthaul and backhaul operation under the same data and controlplanes. This paper focuses on the latter, by experimentally showing theflexibility of the 5G-Crosshaul ControlInfrastructure (XCI). In this sense, various network setups featuring heterogeneous network and computingresources and high-speed mobility were deployed over the 5G-Crosshaul testbed. More specifically, three dif-ferent use cases that exploit the capabilities embedded in the XCI have been experimentally evaluated. First,"hierarchical network orchestration" demonstrates how service setup times in complex multi-technology trans-port networks can be decreased from current manual configuration times in the order of days down to automatedsetups in the order of seconds by means of a resource management application that consumes the XCI services.Second, "energy management of IT and network resources" presents an energy management application thatexploits the XCI to deploy network configurations that achieve energy savings ranging from 15% to 40% bydynamically reacting to datacenter and network conditions. Finally, the XCI was also exploited by an energy management application in a high-speed train mobility scenario featuring a radio over fiber network in which savings close to 80% were achieved.