CARES: Computation-aware Scheduling in Virtualized Radio Access Networks

In a virtualized Radio Access Network (RAN), baseband processing is performed by software running in cloud- computing platforms. However, current protocol stacks were not designed to run in this kind of environments: the high variability on the computational resources consumed by RAN functions may l...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Bega, Dario, Banchs, Albert|||0000-0003-3544-8537, Gramaglia, Marco, Costa-Perez, Xavier, Rost, Peter
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:España
Institución:IMDEA Networks Institute
Repositorio:IMDEA Networks Institute Digital Repository
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:dspace.networks.imdea.org:20.500.12761/628
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12761/628
https://dx.doi.org/DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2018.2873324
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:5G
Computation-aware scheduling
Virtualized RAN
joint scheduling
MCS selection
Descripción
Sumario:In a virtualized Radio Access Network (RAN), baseband processing is performed by software running in cloud- computing platforms. However, current protocol stacks were not designed to run in this kind of environments: the high variability on the computational resources consumed by RAN functions may lead to eventual computational outages (where frames are not decoded on time), severely degrading the resulting performance. In this paper, we address this issue by re-designing two key functions of the protocol stack: (i) scheduling, to select the transmission of those frames that do not incur in computational outages, and (ii) modulation and coding scheme (MCS) selection, to downgrade the selected MCS in case no sufficient computational resources are available. We formulate the resulting problem as a joint optimization and compute the (asymptotically) optimal solution to this problem. We further show that this solution involves solving an NP-hard problem, and propose an algorithm to obtain an approximate solution that is computationally efficient while providing bounded performance over the optimal. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed approach via simulation, showing that it can provide savings as high as 80% of the computational resources while paying a small price in performance.