Network Bandwidth Utilization Optimization with Quantum-Inspired Approach

As the popularity of mobile devices and services continues to increase, the demand for more efficient and effective algorithms to manage network utility is increased. Here, we aim to optimize Network Bandwidth Utilization (NBU) by managing user equipments (UEs) and base stations (BSs) association in 5G ORAN architecture. We consider the network total throughput as an objective function and try to find the suitable Cell Individual Offset (CIO) to trigger UE handover with the A3 event such that the network throughput is optimal. We formulate this problem into a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem such that we can explore the power of Quantum Annealing (QA), which is a promising approach to finding the optimal solution for the NP-Hard problem. We also analyze the penalty coefficients setting problem which impacts the outcome of QA significantly. We test our QUBO formulation on a dataset of 7 BSs and 150 UEs with Fujitsu's third generation Digital Annealer (DA3). Using our QUBO formulation with DA3 solver with fine-tuning, we can improve the throughput with 60% hit rate on this dataset.