Cooperative Cost Game for Multiple Mobile Network Operators Fronthaul Design

Due to a lack of slicing supports, traditional Fronthaul architectures face challenges in providing 5G services and cannot meet the stringent latency and high bandwidth requirements set by the enhanced common public radio interface (eCPRI). Moreover, without an efficient strategy for Fronthaul resource sharing and slicing, the sustainability of 5G networks is at risk due to the high costs associated with the radio access network (RAN). In this paper, we propose an optimized Fronthaul design based on the newly introduced Flex-Ethernet (FlexE) technology to ensure the quality of service requirements for 5G without unnecessary resource over-provisioning. Separating the media access control and physical layers using time division multiplexing (TDM) shim, FlexE enables efficient aggregation of high-volume traffic flows and facilitates low-latency service provisioning and isolated network slicing. We formulate the Fronthaul design problem for a single cell site as a mixed integer linear program (MILP), known as sFFP, and then propose a clustering-based cooperative game (CG-sFFP) to extend the model to multiple cell site deployment. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solutions outperform state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Fronthaul's total cost of ownership (TCO) by at least 45.32%.