Modelling of Computational Resources for 5G RAN

Abstract

The future mobile networks have to be flexible and dynamic to address the exponentially increasing demand with the scarce available radio resources. Hence, 5G systems are going to be virtualised and implemented over cloud data-centres. While elastic computation resource management is a well-studied concept in IT domain, it is a relatively new topic in Telco-cloud environment. Studying the computational complexity of mobile networks is the first step toward enabling elastic and efficient computational resource management in telco environment. This paper presents a brief overview of the latency requirements of Radio Access Networks (RANs) and virtualisation techniques in addition to experimental results for a full virtual physical layer in a container-based virtual environment. The novelty of this paper is presenting a complexity study of virtual RAN through experimental results, in addition to presenting a model for estimating the processing time of each functional block. The measured processing times show that the computational complexity of PHY layer increases as the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) index increases. The processes in uplink such as decoding take almost twice the time comparing to the related functions in the downlink. The proposed model for computational complexity is the missing link for joint radio resource and computational resource management. Using the presented complexity model, one can estimate the computational requirement for provisioning a virtual RAN as well as designing the elastic computational resource management.