Abstract
Mobile traffic demand is expected to grow as much as eight-fold in the coming next five years, putting strain in current wireless infrastructures. Meanwhile the diversity of traffic and standards may explode as well. One of the most common means for matching these mounting requirements is through network densification, essentially increasing the density of deployment of operators’ base stations in many small cells and handling timing critical traffic at the edge. In this paper we take a step in that direction by implementing a virtualized small cell base station consisting of multiple, isolated LTE PHY stacks running concurrently on top of a hypervisor deployed on a cheap, off-the-shelf x86 server and a shared radio head. In particular, we show that it is possible to run multiple virtualized base stations while achieving throughput equal or close to the theoretical maximum. In contrast to C-RAN (Cloud/Centralized Radio Access Network), our virtualized small cell base station has full stack at the edge so that a low latency high throughput front-haul, which is necessary in C-RAN architecture, is not needed. This approach brings all the flexibility and configurability (from network management point of view) that a software based implementation provides while the transparent architecture enables the possibility of multiple standards sharing the same radio infrastructure.
Highlights
In the coming years, growth in mobile data traffic, fueled by the continued adoption of mobile devices and their use for downloading video and other content, will continue to expand at a rapid pace, with reports claiming as much as an eight-fold increase over the course of the five years [1]
We argue that the combination of applying virtualization technologies (e.g., Xen, KVM [6,7]) to base station software, along with the use of inexpensive radio front-ends is a key enabler of network densification
Towards this vision of network densification and infrastructure sharing, we provide a prototypical implementation of a high performance virtualized platform consisting of an off-the-shelf, inexpensive x86 server running the PHY layer of multiple virtualized LTE base stations instances along with a common, shared radio head
Summary
Growth in mobile data traffic, fueled by the continued adoption of mobile devices and their use for downloading video and other content, will continue to expand at a rapid pace, with reports claiming as much as an eight-fold increase over the course of the five years [1]. Regarding radio front-ends, LTE modems based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) [8,9] are gaining momentum as a solution to future dense deployments [10]; a remarkable example is Facebook’s OpenCellular project [11] Towards this vision of network densification and infrastructure sharing, we provide a prototypical implementation of a high performance virtualized platform consisting of an off-the-shelf, inexpensive x86 server running the PHY layer of multiple virtualized LTE base stations (called eNodeBs or eNBs for short) instances along with a common, shared radio head (called SRH hereafter). The sharing of Radio Head is achieved by manipulating IQ samples which implies transparent multitenancy It would be possible for the LTE base station to be multiplexed over different technologies/standards. Our results show that a virtualized eNB can yield throughput at the theoretical maximum rate in certain setups (virtual eNBs with 5 MHz bandwidth), and that up to 4 virtualized eNBs can concurrently run on an inexpensive 4 core x86 server without maxing out its CPU resources
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