MOVE-CU: multi-vendor OpenROADM enhances a virtual environment supporting remote CU-UP migration in a 5G radio network [Invited]

Abstract

Fifth-generation and beyond (B5G) networks must handle stringent requirements for ultra-low latency, high reliability, and dynamic service provisioning across decentralized environments. While container-based live migration has emerged as a flexible mechanism to ensure service continuity during failures and overload scenarios, most proposed approaches are reactive and lack integration with the transport layer and automation through real-time resource orchestration. This work presents a proactive migration framework that tightly couples a 5G radio access network (RAN) architecture with an OpenROADM-compliant optical transport network (OTN) testbed. By leveraging dynamic optical wavelength service creation and container-based network function virtualization, the presented framework enables seamless live migration of the gNB (next generation) central unit–user plane (CU-UP) between two remote locations without disconnecting the supported mobile services. A custom xApp within the near-real-time RAN intelligent controller (Near-RT RIC) monitors system performance metrics and employs predictive analytics to trigger the proactive CU-UP container migration ahead of a probable server overload scenario. A robot framework-based automation platform ensures coordinated orchestration between the compute and transport layer resource allocation to achieve a successful live migration of the container running the CU-UP. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach achieves near-zero mobile user service downtime, demonstrating its effectiveness in meeting the end-to-end quality of service (QoS) requirements of B5G applications.