Implementation of a Large-Scale Virtual-RAN Providing an mMTC Service

Virtualize the Radio Access Networks (RAN) is one of the main objectives for 5G Networks and beyond. To make this objective real, a lot of theory and conceptual solutions are proposed. However, the practical realization still blocked, limited to an extremely low number of virtualized entities (BBU,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (Online) pp. 1028 - 1033
Main Authors Kassi, Mihia, Hamouda, Soumaya
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 19.06.2023
Subjects
5G mobile communication
BBU Pool
Docker Swarm technology
fronthaul
Internet of Things
large-scale virtual BBU Pool
OpenAirInterface platform
Optimization
Performance evaluation
Protocols
RAN virtualization
RRH
Simulation
Software Defined Radio (SDR)
V-RAN
vBBU
Wireless communication
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Summary:Virtualize the Radio Access Networks (RAN) is one of the main objectives for 5G Networks and beyond. To make this objective real, a lot of theory and conceptual solutions are proposed. However, the practical realization still blocked, limited to an extremely low number of virtualized entities (BBU, RRH) and user devices covered. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale virtual RAN (V-RAN) implementation. Basing on an optimization of the OpenAirInterface (OAI) platform, we achieved an increase of the number of virtual BBUs (vBBUs) previously limited, and implement a large-scale virtual BBU Pool (vBBU Pool). We implement secondly, a large-scale virtual Radio Remote Heads (vRRHs) based on the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP-2974) Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology and perform its inter-connection to the large-scale vBBU Pool via an ethernet fronthaul network. To achieve a full orchestration of the large-scale vBBU Pool, we propose an orchestrator based on the Docker Swarm technology. To go further, we implement a wide set of IoT devices as well as an mMTC service. The simulation results show the large-scale VRAN entities performances.
ISSN:2376-6506
DOI:10.1109/IWCMC58020.2023.10183112