Latency-aware Radio Resource Allocation over Cloud RAN for Industry 4.0

The notion of Cloud RAN is taking a prominent role in narrative for the next generation wireless infrastructure. It is also seen as a mean to industrial communication systems. In order to provide reliable wireless connectivity for industrial deployments, by conventional means, the cloud infrastructure needs to be reliable and incur little latency, which however, is contradictory to the stochastic nature of cloud infrastructures. In this paper, we investigate the impact of stochastic delay on a radio resource allocation process deployed in Cloud RAN. We proceed to propose a strategy for realizing timely cloud responses and then adapt that strategy to a radio resource allocation problem. Further, we evaluate the strategies in an industrial IoT scenario using a simulated environment. Experimentation shows that, with our proposed strategy, a significant performance improvement on timely responses can be achieved even with noisy cloud environment. Improvements in resource utilization can be also attained for a resource allocation process deployed over Cloud RAN with this strategy.