Abstract

Mobile traffic demand is expected to grow as much as eight-fold in the coming next five years, putting strain in current wireless infrastructure. 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 this paper we take a step in that direction by implementing a virtualized 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.

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

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Summary

Introduction

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

Design and implementation
IQ switch validation
End-to-end performance evaluation
Use case
Related work
Findings
Conclusion and future work
Full Text
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