Multiplexing gains achieved in pools of baseband computation units in 4G cellular networks

The tremendous increase of mobile user traffic load within the last few years forces us to efficiently use the wireless network and processing resources. Cloud computing and virtualization techniques offer an exciting opportunity to considerably reduce operation costs and provide flexible and dynamic systems. In this paper we present a simulation study for a cloud base station, which concentrates baseband processing functions of multiple radio sites. There we focus on the multiplexing-gains induced from user load and traffic heterogeneity. Our simulation results show that the data traffic influences the variance of the compute resource utilization, which in consequence leads to significant multiplexing gains if multiple sectors are aggregated into one single cloud base station. In addition, the spatial user distribution has a high impact on the compute resource load. These findings should be taken into account for the assessment of multiplexing gains in real networks.