Downtime-Aware O-RAN VNF Deployment Strategy for Optimized Self-Healing in the O-Cloud

Abstract: Due to the huge surge in the traffic of IoT devices and applications, mobile networks require a new paradigm shift to handle such demand roll out. With the 5G economics, those networks should provide virtualized multi-vendor and intelligent systems that can scale and efficiently optimize the investment of the underlying infrastructure. Therefore, the market stakeholders have proposed the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) as one of the solutions to improve the network performance, agility, and time-to-market of new applications. O-RAN harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and new network technologies (NFV and SDN) to allow operators to manage their infrastructure in a cost-efficient manner. Therefore, it is necessary to address the O-RAN performance and availability challenges autonomously while maintaining the quality of service. In this work, we propose an optimized deployment strategy for the virtualized O-RAN units in the O-Cloud to minimize the network's outage while complying with the performance and operational requirements. The model's evaluation provides an optimal deployment strategy that maximizes the network's overall availability and adheres to the O-RAN-specific requirements.