A Reliability and latency-aware routing framework for 5G transport infrastructures

The 5G technology is providing totally new opportunities to mobile communications and their related applications, fostering the creation of service ecosystems and business models that will significantly revolutionize our daily life. With its massive scalability, resiliency and time-sensitive performance demands it will significantly increase the footprint of the underlying transport infrastructure by requiring new control plane facilities capable of supporting the specific needs characterizing end-to-end connections between mobile devices and their targets. Such facilities, built on top of an optical backhaul/fronthaul layer must rely on new routing mechanisms able to meet 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication requirements. Accordingly, this work presents a novel multi-objective distributed online routing scheme for converged fiber-radio transport infrastructures. Such scheme is able to guarantee the 5G reliability and delay optimization needs, while simultaneously taking into account the more traditional network engineering objectives, aiming at satisfying the maximum number of communication requests by taking the best from the already made infrastructural investments. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated through extensive simulation experiments that resulted in quite promising outcomes, enforcing confidence in future industrial developments.