Analysis of virtualized Turbo-decoder implementation for Cloud-RAN systems

The virtualization of radio access network functions using centralized cloud platforms will enable advanced joint processing approaches and offers the ability to improve the utilization efficiency of the computational resources. However, the tight timing constraints caused by the protocol stack makes the implementation of physical layer functionality on a cloud-platform a challenging task. As the Turbo decoder is the computational most demanding part of the LTE uplink processing, we analyze its implementation on a typical cloud platform, discuss the rate-complexity tradeoff, and analyze the benefit of computational aware link adaptation.