Baseband unit pooling using shared scheduler

A method, comprising:

• detecting, by network equipment comprising a processor, a context setup request message from a user equipment communicating via a node;
• determining, by the network equipment, whether baseband unit resources are sufficient to process the traffic of the user equipment according to a sufficiency criterion;
• in response to determining that the baseband unit resources are sufficient to process the traffic of the user equipment, assigning, by the network equipment, a first distributed unit instance to process traffic of the user equipment, and coupling the first distributed unit instance to the node;
• in response to determining that the baseband unit resources are not sufficient to process the traffic of the user equipment, allocating, by the network equipment, a second distributed unit instance, assigning the second distributed unit instance to process traffic of the user equipment, and coupling the second distributed unit instance to the node;
• and
• communicating, by the network equipment, scheduling information to the node to schedule the traffic of the user equipment.

A non-transitory machine-readable medium, comprising executable instructions that, when executed by a processor, facilitate performance of operations, the operations comprising:

• detecting a user equipment context setup request message communicated from a gNodeB centralized unit control plane node to a gNodeB distributed unit;
• determining, based on the user equipment context setup request message, that existing baseband unit resources of a baseband unit hub are not sufficient to process traffic of a user equipment associated with the user equipment context setup request message;
• in response to determining that the baseband unit resources are not sufficient to process the traffic of the user equipment, allocating additional baseband unit resources to process the traffic of the user equipment;
• and
• communicating scheduling information, by a shared medium access control scheduler of the baseband unit hub, to a node to schedule the traffic of the user equipment.