Current cellular networks rely on closed and inflexible infrastructure tightly controlled by a handful of vendors. Their configuration requires vendor support and lengthy manual operations, which prevent Telco Operators (TOs) from unlocking the full network potential and from performing fine grained performance optimization, especially on a per-user basis. To address these key issues, this paper introduces CellOS, a fully automated optimization and management framework for cellular networks that requires negligible intervention (“zero-touch”). CellOS leverages softwarization and automatic optimization principles to bridge Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and cross-layer optimization. Unlike state-of-the-art SDN-inspired solutions for cellular networking, CellOS: (i) Hides low-level network details through a general virtual network abstraction; (ii) allows TOs to define high-level control objectives to dictate the desired network behavior without requiring knowledge of optimization techniques, and (iii) automatically generates and executes distributed control programs for simultaneous optimization of heterogeneous control objectives on multiple network slices. CellOS has been implemented and evaluated on an indoor testbed with two different LTE-compliant implementations: OpenAirInterface and srsLTE. We further demonstrated CellOS capabilities on the long-range outdoor POWDER-RENEW PAWR 5G platform. Results from scenarios with multiple base stations and users show that CellOS is platform-independent and self-adapts to diverse network deployments. Our investigation shows that CellOS outperforms existing solutions on key metrics, including throughput (up to 86% improvement), energy efficiency (up to 84%) and fairness (up to 29%).

当前的蜂窝网络依赖于少数供应商严格控制的封闭且僵化的基础架构。它们的配置需要供应商支持和冗长的手动操作，这会阻止电信运营商（TO）释放全部网络潜能，并阻止执行细粒度的性能优化，尤其是针对每个用户。为了解决这些关键问题，本文介绍了CellOS，这是一种用于蜂窝网络的全自动优化和管理框架，需要忽略的干预（“零接触”）。CellOS利用软化和自动优化原理来桥接软件定义网络（SDN）和跨层优化。与最新的，SDN启发式的蜂窝网络解决方案不同，CellOS：（i）通过通用隐藏隐藏低级网络细节虚拟网络抽象; （ii）允许TO定义高层控制目标在不需要优化技术知识的情况下决定所需的网络行为，并且（iii）自动生成并执行分布式控制程序，以同时优化多个网络切片上的异构控制目标。CellOS已在室内测试平台上通过两种不同的LTE兼容实施进行了实施和评估：OpenAirInterface和srsLTE。我们在远程户外POWDER-RENEW PAWR 5G平台上进一步展示了CellOS功能。来自具有多个基站和用户的方案的结果表明，CellOS与平台无关，并且能够自适应各种网络部署。我们的调查显示，CellOS在关键指标方面的性能优于现有解决方案，包括吞吐量（提高高达86％），能源效率（高达84％）和公平性（高达29％）。