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, 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.