Enabling Efficient SIMD Acceleration for Virtual Radio Access Network

Abstract

Nowadays, the Radio Access Network (RAN) is resorting to Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm to enhance its architectural viability. However, our characterization of virtual RAN (vRAN) on modern processors depicts a frustrating picture of Single-Instruction Multi-Data (SIMD) acceleration. The data arrangement processes in vRAN software pipeline do not align data for efficient SIMD processing across the pipeline. Specifically, existing data arrangement processes cannot fully utilize the ALU ports in modern processors, which leads to high backend bound and fails to saturate the memory bandwidth between registers and L1 cache. To overcome the overburden, we thoroughly examine the state-of-the-art CPU architecture and find there are idle ports which could be utilized by the process. Motivated by this observation, we propose ”Arithmetic Ports Consciousness Mechanism” (APCM) utilizing these idle ports to eliminate the backend bound and saturate the memory bandwidth. The APCM decreases the data arrangement’s backend bound from 45 to 3 and promotes its memory bandwidth utilization by 4X-16X. The CPU time of the data arrangement process can be reduced by 67 - 92 and the overall latency of the vRAN packet transmission is decreased by 12 - 20.