ABSTRACT
RAN virtualization will become a key technology for the last mile of next-generation mobile networks driven by initiatives such as the O-RAN alliance. However, due to the computing fluctuations inherent to wireless dynamics and resource contention in shared computing infrastructure, the price to migrate from dedicated to shared platforms may be too high. Indeed, we show in this paper that the baseline architecture of a base station's distributed unit (DU) collapses upon moments of deficit in computing capacity. Recent solutions to accelerate some signal processing tasks certainly help but do not tackle the core problem: a DU pipeline that requires predictable computing to provide carrier-grade reliability.
We present Nuberu, a novel pipeline architecture for 4G/5G DUs specifically engineered for non-deterministic computing platforms. Our design has one key objective to attain reliability: to guarantee a minimum set of signals that preserve synchronization between the DU and its users during computing capacity shortages and, provided this, maximize network throughput. To this end, we use techniques such as tight deadline control, jitter-absorbing buffers, predictive HARQ, and congestion control. Using an experimental prototype, we show that Nuberu attains >95% of the theoretical spectrum efficiency in hostile environments, where state-of-art approaches lose connectivity, and at least 80% resource savings.
- 3GPP. 2020. 5G;NG-RAN; Architecture description. 3GPP TS 38.401 version 16.2.0 Release 16.Google Scholar
- NGMN Alliance. 2019. 5G E2E Technology to Support Verticals URLLC Requirements.Google Scholar
- Alex Aronov, Leonid Kazakevich, Jane Mack, Fred Schreider, and Scott Newton. 2019. 5G NR LDPC Decoding Performance Comparison between GPU & FPGA Platforms. In 2019 IEEE Long Island Systems, Applications and Technology Conference (LISAT). IEEE, 1--6.Google Scholar
- Jose A. Ayala-Romero, Andres Garcia-Saavedra, Xavier Costa-Perez, and George Iosifidis. 2021. Bayesian Online Learning for Energy-Aware Resource Orchestration in Virtualized RANs. In IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. 1--10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jose A. Ayala-Romero, Andres Garcia-Saavedra, Marco Gramaglia, Xavier Costa-Perez, Albert Banchs, and Juan J. Alcaraz. 2020. vrAIn: Deep Learning based Orchestration for Computing and Radio Resources in vRANs. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (2020), 1--1. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Vinay Chamola, Sambit Patra, Neeraj Kumar, and Mohsen Guizani. 2020. FPGA for 5G: Re-configurable Hardware for Next Generation Communication. IEEE Wireless Communications (2020).Google Scholar
- Cisco, Rakuten, Altiostar. 2019. Reimagining the End-to-End Mobile Network in the 5G Era. White Paper (2019).Google Scholar
- Erik Dahlman, Stefan Parkvall, and Johan Skold. 2018. 5G NR: The next generation wireless access technology. Academic Press.Google Scholar
- Jian Ding, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Anuj Kalia, and Lin Zhong. 2020. Agora: Real-time massive MIMO baseband processing in software. In Proceedings of ACM CoNEXT '20. ACM.Google ScholarDigital Library
- John C Eidson. 2006. Measurement, control, and communication using IEEE 1588. Springer Science & Business Media.Google Scholar
- Xenofon Foukas, Mahesh K. Marina, and Kimon Kontovasilis. 2017. Orion: RAN Slicing for a Flexible and Cost-Effective Multi-Service Mobile Network Architecture. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 127--140. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andres Garcia-Saavedra and Xavier Costa-Perez. 2021. O-RAN: Disrupting the Virtualized RAN Ecosystem. IEEE Communications Standards Magazine (2021).Google Scholar
- Ismael Gomez-Miguelez, Andres Garcia-Saavedra, Paul D Sutton, Pablo Serrano, Cristina Cano, and Doug J Leith. 2016. srsLTE: an open-source platform for LTE evolution and experimentation. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation, and Characterization. 25--32.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Junzhi Gong, Yuliang Li, Bilal Anwer, Aman Shaikh, and Minlan Yu. 2020. Microscope: Queue-Based Performance Diagnosis for Network Functions. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '20. ACM, 390--403.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wang Tsu Han and Raymond Knopp. 2018. OpenAirInterface: A pipeline structure for 5G. In 2018 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP). IEEE, 1--4.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lajos Hanzo, Jason P Woodard, and Patrick Robertson. 2007. Turbo decoding and detection for wireless applications. Proc. IEEE 95, 6 (2007), 1178--1200.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yan Huang, Shaoran Li, Y Thomas Hou, and Wenjing Lou. 2018. GPF: A GPU-based Design to Achieve~ 100 μs Scheduling for 5G NR. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. 207--222.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Intel. 2017. vRAN: The Next Step in Network Transformation. White Paper (2017).Google Scholar
- Intel. 2019. FlexRAN LTE and 5G NR FEC Software Development Kit Modules. https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/flexran-lte-and-5g-nr-fec-software-development-kit-modules.htmlGoogle Scholar
- Florian Kaltenberger, Aloizio P Silva, Abhimanyu Gosain, Luhan Wang, and Tien-Thinh Nguyen. 2020. OpenAirInterface: Democratizing innovation in the 5G Era. Computer Networks (2020), 107284.Google Scholar
- Praveen Kumar, Nandita Dukkipati, Nathan Lewis, Yi Cui, Yaogong Wang, Chonggang Li, Valas Valancius, Jake Adriaens, Steve Gribble, Nate Foster, and Amin Vahdat. 2019. PicNIC: Predictable Virtualized NIC. In Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM '19). Association for Computing Machinery, 351--366.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jiangpeng Li, Guanghui He, Hexi Hou, Zhejun Zhang, and Jun Ma. 2011. Memory efficient layered decoder design with early termination for LDPC codes. In 2011 IEEE International Symposium of Circuits and Systems (ISCAS). IEEE, 2697--2700.Google ScholarCross Ref
- X. Lin, J. Li, R. Baldemair, J. T. Cheng, S. Parkvall, D. C. Larsson, H. Koorapaty, M. Frenne, S. Falahati, A. Grovlen, and K. Werner. 2019. 5G New Radio: Unveiling the Essentials of the Next Generation Wireless Access Technology. IEEE Communications Standards Magazine 3, 3 (2019), 30--37.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Antonis Manousis, Rahul Anand Sharma, Vyas Sekar, and Justine Sherry. 2020. Contention-Aware Performance Prediction For Virtualized Network Functions. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '20. ACM, 270--282.Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Marquez, M. Gramaglia, M. Fiore, A. Banchs, and X. Costa-Pérez. 2019. Resource Sharing Efficiency in Network Slicing. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management 16, 3 (2019), 909--923. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Michael Marty, Marc de Kruijf, Jacob Adriaens, Christopher Alfeld, Sean Bauer, Carlo Contavalli, Michael Dalton, Nandita Dukkipati, William C. Evans, Steve Gribble, Nicholas Kidd, Roman Kononov, Gautam Kumar, Carl Mauer, Emily Musick, Lena Olson, Erik Rubow, Michael Ryan, Kevin Springborn, Paul Turner, Valas Valancius, Xi Wang, and Amin Vahdat. 2019. Snap: A Microkernel Approach to Host Networking. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 399--413. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jose Mendes, XianJun Jiao, Andres Garcia-Saavedra, Felipe Huici, and Ingrid Moerman. 2019. Cellular access multi-tenancy through small-cell virtualization and common RF front-end sharing. Computer Communications 133 (2019), 59--66.Google ScholarCross Ref
- O-RAN Alliance. 2020. Cloud Architecture and Deployment Scenarios for O-RAN Virtualized RAN v02.01 (O-RAN.WG6.CAD-v02.01). Technical Report.Google Scholar
- Amy Ousterhout, Joshua Fried, Jonathan Behrens, Adam Belay, and Hari Balakrishnan. 2019. Shenango: Achieving High CPU Efficiency for Latency-sensitive Datacenter Workloads. In 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 19). USENIX Association, Boston, MA, 361--378. https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi19/presentation/ousterhoutGoogle ScholarDigital Library
- Rethink Technology Research. 2020. Special Report: Open Networks. Technical Report (2020).Google Scholar
- P. Rost and A. Prasad. 2014. Opportunistic Hybrid ARQ---Enabler of Centralized-RAN Over Nonideal Backhaul. IEEE Wireless Communications Letters 3, 5 (2014), 481--484. Google ScholarCross Ref
- P Salija and B Yamuna. 2016. An efficient early iteration termination for turbo decoder. Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology (2016).Google Scholar
- Samsung. 2019. Virtualized Radio Access Network: Architecture, Key technologies and Benefits. Technical Report (2019).Google Scholar
- Soma Velayutham. 2019. NVIDIA CEO Introduces Aerial --- Software to Accelerate 5G on NVIDIA GPUs. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/10/21/aerial-application-framework-5g-networks/Google Scholar
- Nils Strodthoff, Barış Göktepe, Thomas Schierl, Cornelius Hellge, and Wojciech Samek. 2019. Enhanced machine learning techniques for early HARQ feedback prediction in 5G. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 37, 11 (2019), 2573--2587.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sujata Tibrewala. 2018. The 5G network transformation. https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/the-5g-network-transformationGoogle Scholar
- Chen Sun, Jun Bi, Zhilong Zheng, Heng Yu, and Hongxin Hu. 2017. NFP: Enabling Network Function Parallelism in NFV. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '17. ACM, 43--56.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yang Sun and Joseph R Cavallaro. 2011. A flexible LDPC/turbo decoder architecture. Journal of Signal Processing Systems 64, 1 (2011), 1--16.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amin Tootoonchian, Aurojit Panda, Chang Lan, Melvin Walls, Katerina Argyraki, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker. 2018. ResQ: Enabling SLOs in Network Function Virtualization. In 15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 18). USENIX Association, Renton, WA, 283--297. https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi18/presentation/tootoonchianGoogle ScholarDigital Library
- Lanfranco Zanzi, Vincenzo Sciancalepore, Andres Garcia-Saavedra, and Xavier Costa-Pérez. 2018. OVNES: Demonstrating 5G network slicing overbooking on real deployments. In IEEE INFOCOM 2018-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS). IEEE, 1--2.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Nuberu: reliable RAN virtualization in shared platforms
Recommendations
Concordia: teaching the 5G vRAN to share compute
SIGCOMM '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 ConferenceVirtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) offers a cost-efficient solution for running the 5G RAN as a virtualized network function (VNF) on commodity hardware. The vRAN is more efficient than traditional RANs, as it multiplexes several base station ...
A USIM Compatible 5G AKA Protocol with Perfect Forward Secrecy
TRUSTCOM '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA - Volume 01In this paper, we present constructions for 3GPP Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) that provides Perfect Forward Secrecy for the session key. Further, the constructs prevents an attacker, with access to the long-term pre-shared key, from simply ...
Comments