Pushing Programmability to the Edge and beyond: the Evolutions of Mobile Networks Architecture towards Smart Radio Environments

This talk precede the talk of Prof. Andrea Araldo “Technical and economic strategies for Multi-Tenant Edge Computing“.

The evolution of the architecture of Mobile Radio Networks is going in the direction of “softwarization” of network functions and the disaggregation of the Radio Access Network (RAN).

Moving from specialized hardware to general purpose servers for a fully distributed system requires deep changes in the physical infrastructure with a hierarchy of mini data centers to be deployed, but creates interesting synergies with the evolution of the Cloud architecture which is pushing computation towards the edge of the network.

Embracing the cloud paradigm does not only allows to virtualize network functions but also  create opportunities to open programmable interfaces and to implement intelligent control strategies able to optimize resources and adapt to traffic needs.

At the extreme periphery of the radio access network the need to use of high frequencies is also modifying the architecture with new smart radio devices (such as Reflective Intelligent Surfaces or Network Controlled Repeaters) that can also be controlled through open programmable interface.

The seminar will present these evolution trends of the architecture of radio networks and pinpoint the research opportunities for defining new algorithms for optimizing network behavior.