Operating system for software-defined cellular networks

An infrastructure-based wireless network comprising:

• a Radio Access Network (RAN) Intelligent Controller (RIC) of the network having an operating system for controlling a plurality of base station nodes of the network for communication with a plurality of user equipments (UEs) in communication with the network, the operating system comprising:
• a system host controller, including one or more processors and memory, the host controller including:
• a network abstraction module operative to create a representation of physical network elements of the network, wherein the physical network elements include the plurality of nodes and the plurality of UEs;
• a problem generation module operative to define a network control problem comprising pairing one or more control objectives and one or more constraints with available ones of the physical network elements;
• a problem decomposition module operative to decompose the network control problem into a set of subproblems associated with selected nodes of the network;
• and
• a solution program dispatcher module operative to dispatch the subproblems as solution programs to the selected nodes;
• and
• the infrastructure-based wireless network further comprising the plurality of base station nodes, each node including a reconfigurable edge element having a reconfigurable protocol stack configured to execute a corresponding one or more of the dispatched solution programs using local parameters to control communication between the node and one or more corresponding UEs.