Modelling the power consumption and trade-offs of virtualised cloud radio access networks

In large-scale computing centres, the advancement of knowledge in regard to the predicted power consumption (PC) and concerns of host servers that run virtual machines (VMs) could improve the capacity planning and networks’ energy efficiency. A parameterised power model is proposed to explore the individual components within the virtualisation-based cloud radio access network. The model evaluates the PC and trade-offs of a server undergoing virtualisation. After cooling and total PC for cloud radio access network architecture, with and without virtualisation have been compared using differentiated parameters, such as varying number of bare-metal base band units, VMs and system's resource blocks (RBs) share/bandwidth. The results show dramatic decrease in the total PC via virtualising the core network. In addition, the degraded performance of each virtualised server is demonstrated via modelling the execution time and overhead costs. These costs have been resulted from increasing the number of hosted VMs and utilised RBs by each VM.