JARS: A Joint Allocation of Radio and System Resources for Virtualized Radio Access Networks

Mobile operators are widely adopting Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to get the benefits of virtualization, including ease of deployment, flexibility, and cost savings. NFV allows multiple virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRANs) to run on commodity hardware enabling joint signal processing and efficient interference management. In addition, mobile operators can run general-purpose workloads alongside vRANs to utilize spare system resources in the NFV infrastructure. In such a consolidated scenario, it is necessary to ensure that the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of vRAN workloads are always met. But the workload consolidation could cause high variability and unpredictability in the performance of the deployed vRANs due to contentions for shared system resources like CPU cores, Last Level Cache (LLC), etc. In order to address this problem, we present JARS – a joint allocation of radio and system resources for the NFV infrastructure – that dynamically adjusts system resources such as CPU cores and LLC-ways, and radio resources such as Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) to ensure KPIs for vRANs and improve overall resource utilization by workload consolidation. We profile srsLTE to determine the minimal CPU core and LLC resource requirements to satisfy KPIs during different traffic loads, which is used in the JARS. Experimental studies on a prototype system show that the proposed JARS outperforms a state-of-the-art scheme by 23%.