2020/12/22 by Matthias Sander-Frigau, Sander-Frigau, Matthias, Tianyi Zhang +7
Computer Science · Engineering · #Caching and Content Delivery #Energy Harvesting in Wireless Networks #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Software-Defined Networks and 5G
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.12434
openalex publication_date 2020/12/22 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Radio access network (RAN) virtualization is gaining more and more ground and\nexpected to re-architect the next-generation cellular networks. Existing RAN\nvirtualization studies and solutions have mostly focused on sharing\ncommunication capacity and tend to require the use of the same PHY and MAC\nlayers across network slices. This approach has not considered the scenarios\nwhere different slices require different PHY and MAC layers, for instance, for\nradically different services and for whole-stack research in wireless living\nlabs where novel PHY and MAC layers need to be deployed concurrently with\nexisting ones on the same physical infrastructure. To enable whole-stack\nslicing where different PHY and MAC layers may be deployed in different slices,\nwe develop PV-RAN, the first open-source virtual RAN platform that enables the\nsharing of the same SDR physical resources across multiple slices. Through API\nRemoting, PV-RAN enables running paravirtualized instances of OpenAirInterface\n(OAI) at different slices without requiring modifying OAI source code. PV-RAN\neffectively leverages the inter-domain communication mechanisms of Xen to\ntransport time-sensitive I/Q samples via shared memory, making the\nvirtualization overhead in communication almost negligible. We conduct detailed\nperformance benchmarking of PV-RAN and demonstrate its low overhead and high\nefficiency. We also integrate PV-RAN with the CyNet wireless living lab for\nsmart agriculture and transportation.\n