Practical DU-CU Placement in an Enhanced Mobile BroadBand Request During 5G Traffic

5G technology offers numerous advantages, including high data rates, improved connectivity, reduced latency, and increased reliability. These benefits have favored the evolution of network architecture, particularly the disaggregation of radio access networks (RAN) into three distinct functional components: radio units (RU), distributed units (DU), and centralized units (CU). This modular segmentation directly affects deployment costs and energy consumption. In this study, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to minimize the deployment costs of DU and CU functions while considering network indicators and resource constraints in the context of enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services. The model is evaluated based on a network topology in which radio units (RUs), candidate sites (CSs), and data centers (DCs) are distributed across a territory. The objective is to identify the optimal candidate sites for deploying the DU and CU functions to ensure a continuous service path from the RU to the DC. To ensure the scalability of the solution on large-scale networks and reduce computation time, we also developed a heuristic algorithm capable of providing solutions close to those obtained by the MILP solver. The simulation results indicate that the operator’s defined latency constraints and functional split type significantly influence deployment costs.