Virtualization-based Radio Access Network Evolution

Abstract

The recent researches on telecommunication area see the potential for network functions virtualization (NFV) to reduce both capital and operational expenditures (CapEx/OpEx), as well as speed up the time to market for new services. These benefits arise because NFV helps decouple network functions from hardware so they are no longer tied to proprietary hardware, running instead on high-volume, industry-standard server platforms. At the heart of NFV is virtualization technology, which until recently has posed significant challenges to realizing the real-time performance required to support telecom workloads. This paper describes some of the issues equipment developers face in a virtualized environment and explains how they can be overcome. In particular, there is an in-depth analysis showing how a virtualized base station running on a general purpose processor-based platform can meet the 4G network requirements for latency and performance. Some test results and the corresponding observations are described for real-time processing in virtualized environment. We also present the RAN evolution vision based on virtualization technology.