Towards the deployment of a fully centralized Cloud-RAN architecture

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Abstract
In the framework of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), we address in this work the design and sizing of Cloud-RAN architectures. We concretely investigate the execution time of software-based Base Band Units (BBUs) on multi-core systems. Since Cloud-RAN requires a real-time behavior, we use parallel programming techniques in order to minimize the runtime of BBU functions. For an efficient utilization of computing resources, we investigate the relevance of resource pooling where a global scheduling algorithm allocates processing units to runnable BBU-jobs. We specifically examine the gain that can be obtained when applying data parallelism on the channel decoding BBU-function which is the most expensive one in terms of processing time. Performance results show a significant reduction in the runtime of PHY functions which enables the deployment of a fully centralized Cloud-RAN architecture.