Enhancing Cloud-Native Resource Allocation with Probabilistic Forecasting Techniques in O-RAN
It addresses efficient resource provisioning for telecommunications in the 6G era, but the work appears incremental as it focuses on applying existing forecasting methods to O-RAN.
This paper tackles resource allocation in cloud-native Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) by integrating probabilistic forecasting techniques, showing that DeepAR outperforms other models in accuracy based on error metrics.
The need for intelligent and efficient resource provisioning for the productive management of resources in real-world scenarios is growing with the evolution of telecommunications towards the 6G era. Technologies such as Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) can help to build interoperable solutions for the management of complex systems. Probabilistic forecasting, in contrast to deterministic single-point estimators, can offer a different approach to resource allocation by quantifying the uncertainty of the generated predictions. This paper examines the cloud-native aspects of O-RAN together with the radio App (rApp) deployment options. The integration of probabilistic forecasting techniques as a rApp in O-RAN is also emphasized, along with case studies of real-world applications. Through a comparative analysis of forecasting models using the error metric, we show the advantages of Deep Autoregressive Recurrent network (DeepAR) over other deterministic probabilistic estimators. Furthermore, the simplicity of Simple-Feed-Forward (SFF) leads to a fast runtime but does not capture the temporal dependencies of the input data. Finally, we present some aspects related to the practical applicability of cloud-native O-RAN with probabilistic forecasting.