SWITCH-BASED WORKLOAD DISTRIBUTION FOR VIRTUALIZED RANS

Aspects of the present disclosure relate to allocating workloads to vRANs via programmable switches at far-edge cloud datacenters. Traditionally, traffic allocation is handled by dedicated servers running load-balancing software. However, rerouting RAN traffic to such servers increases both energy and capital costs, degrades end-to-end performance, and requires additional physical space, all of which are undesirable or even infeasible for a RAN far-edge datacenter. Since switches are located in the path of data traffic, workflow policies can be designed to inspect packet headers of incoming traffic, evaluate real-time network information, determine available vRAN instances, and update the packet headers to steer the incoming traffic for processing. As network conditions change, the workflow policies enable the switch to dynamically redirect workloads to alternative vRANs for processing. As a result, RAN processing efficiency and fault tolerance are improved-even with changing network conditions and spikes in data traffic.