ONIX: Open Radio Network Information eXchange

Abstract

While Video-On-Demand still takes the lion’s share of the Internet traffic, we are witnessing a significant increase in the adoption of services and applications characterized by tight requirements in terms of bitrate and latency, e.g. augmented/virtual reality mobile applications. Supporting such applications over a mobile network is very challenging due to both the volatile nature of the network itself and the long distance between the user and the application which usually sits in the cloud. In order to address this and also other challenges, like security, reliability, and scalability, a new paradigm termed Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged. MEC places computational resources closer to the end-user thus reducing the overall end-to-end latency and the utilization of the mobile network backhaul. However, in order to adapt to the volatile nature of a mobile network, MEC applications need real-time information about the status of the radio channel. In this paper we present Open radio Network Information eXchange, ONIX, an ETSI-compliant Radio Network Information Service that allows MEC applications to get up-to-date information about the radio network status. This article reports on the design and implementation of ONIX and on its evaluation, discusses various use cases that can benefit from ONIX (ranging from teleoperated driving and media streaming to Industrial Internet of Things), and provides a roadmap of future research challenges.