Towards an Efficient SIMD Virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) and Edge Cloud System

Abstract

Nowadays, virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) plays a vital role in today's mobile edge system for its better support for latency-sensitive applications. However, our characterization of vRAN on modern processors depicts a frustrating picture of Single-Instruction Multi-Data (SIMD) acceleration. Specifically, the existing data arrangement processes cannot efficiently utilize the ports in modern processors, which leads to high backend bound and fails to saturate the memory bandwidth between registers and the L1 cache. To tackle the issue, we thoroughly examine the state-of-the-art CPU architecture and observe the idle ports which could be utilized by the process. Motivated by this observation, we propose an “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 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> to 3 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> and promotes its memory bandwidth utilization by 4X-16X. Moreover, we illustrate that the APCM can be utilized to promote the performance of typical mobile edge applications such as network routing, image processing, and AI applications. The CPU time of the data arrangement process time of the selected typical mobile edge applications can be reduced by 55 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> - 95 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> when utilizing the proposed mechanism.