Publication details

L. Abeni, T. Cucinotta, B. Pinczel, P. Matray, M. Srinivasan, T. Lindquist. "On the use of Linux Real-Time Features for RAN Packet Processing in Cloud Environments," in Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC 2022), International Supercomputing Conference - High Performance (ISC 2022), June 2nd, 2022, Hamburg, Germany.

Abstract

This paper shows how to use a Linux-based operating system as a real-time processing platform for low-latency and predictable packet processing in cloudified radio-access network (cRAN) scenarios. This use-case exhibits challenging end-to-end processing latencies, in the order of milliseconds for the most time-critical layers of the stack. A significant portion of the variability and instability in the observed end-to-end performance in this domain is due to the power saving capabilities of modern CPUs, often in contrast with the low-latency and high-performance requirements of this type of applications. We discuss how to properly configure the system for this scenario, and evaluate the proposed configuration on a synthetic application designed to mimic the behavior and computational requirements of typical software components implementing baseband processing in production environments.

Download paper

Last updated on
18 March 2024