Multiplexing Gains Achieved in Pools of Baseband Computation Units in 4G Cellular Networks

The tremendous increase of mobile user traffic load forces us to develop intelligent systems to achieve an effective use of the wireless network and processing resources. Cloud computing and virtualization techniques enable us to considerably reduce operation costs and provide flexible and dynamic systems. In this paper we present a simulation study for a cloud base station providing a concentration of base station functions with a dynamic assignment of a limited number of processing resources. 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 MSS-BBU. In addition, the spatial user distribution has a high impact on the compute resource load. These findings should be taken into account for the calculation of multiplexing gains in real networks.