C-RAN virtualisation with dedicated hardware accelerator

PoC Team

China Mobile

Alcatel-Lucent

Wind River Systems

Intel

Main Contact

Jinri Huang, China Mobile huangjinri@CHINAMOBILE.COM

PoC Demo

Mobile World Congress, 24-28 Feb 2014, Barcelona, Spain

ETSI NFV PoC ZONE @ SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, 15-17 October 2014, Dusseldorf, Germany

Abstract

This PoC aims at demonstrating the feasibility of base station virtualization, evaluating the performance and then speeding up the maturity of the ecosystem. It will realize C-RAN (cloud RAN) and implement virtualisation based on general-purpose platform which will support not only TD-LTE but also GSM systems. To do that, we basically use two kinds of servers, named modem servers and control servers, respectively. The modem servers mainly realize the TD-LTE partial L1 and L2 protocols in virtual machines. In order to meet the stringent real-time requirement imposed by wireless signal processing, a dedicated hardware accelerator will be used to process partial physical layer functions such as FFT/iFFT, channel coding/decoding. On the other hand, the TD-LTE L3 and GSM protocol are implemented on the control servers. To evaluate the performance, two scenarios are selected. One is to demonstrate the multi-RAT capability on the same platform. In particular, GSM and TD-LTE will be encapsulated in form of virtual machines and operate simultaneously. Two commercial TD-LTE UEs will demo video calls while two GSM UEs will be used to demonstrate the voice service. The other scenario is to demonstrate LTE L3 live migration without service interruption.

PoC Proposal

NFVPER(14)000021r1__NFV_ISG_PoC_Proposal__C-RAN_virtualization.doc

UPDATED proposal (13/10/2014): NFV(14)000229_PoC_update-_clean_version_for_PoC_of_C-RAN_virtualization.doc

PoC Report

PoC Interim Report (16 September 2014): NFV(14)000156_report_for_PoC_7__C-RAN_virtualization_with_dedicated_.doc