Evaluation Methodology for Virtual Base Station Platforms in Radio Access Networks

Virtual base stations (BS) with scalable resources and flexible functions are necessary for the fifth-generation and future mobile systems. The virtualization platform is the fundamental component of virtual BSs and plays a very important role in determining BS performance. As BS virtualization platforms can be provided by both conventional BS manufactures and third-party software vendors, it is crucial to define unified methodology to evaluate the performance of different virtualization platforms. In this paper, for the first time in literature, we design a set of comprehensive performance metrics and propose evaluation methods for BS virtualization platforms. More specifically, there are two types of metrics, i.e., micro level and macro level metrics. Micro level metrics quantify the virtualization platforms’ basic performances including real-time performance and virtualization overhead. Macro level metrics quantify the platforms ability to support BS resource and function virtualization while satisfying the radio access network requirements. Correspondingly, two-level evaluation methodology is designed to collect micro and macro level metrics from different parts of a virtual BS by running proper workloads. Finally, using the proposed methodology, two representative virtualization platforms, i.e., KVM hypervisor and Super BS virtualization platform are evaluated. These experiments verify that the proposed methodology can effectively evaluate the performance of different platforms to provide a valuable reference for the selection of virtual BS platforms. Moreover, the proposed evaluation methodology is a significant step toward constructing an open ecosystem for radio access networks.