A Study on Virtual BS Live Migration - C Part I: Performance of Virtual BS Migration on GPP Based Virtualization Platform

General purpose processor (GPP) based cloud radio access network (Cloud RAN) has attracted research interests from the cellular industry. One advantage of adopting general purpose platform is that general purpose platform is well supported by virtualization technology, which enables the instantiation of multiple virtual machines/basestations (BS) on a single processing board and supports virtual machines (VM) live migration which dramatically reduces the power consumption of the resource pool. Compared with traditional IT applications, the BS performs real-time signal processing which is a time stringent task. Whether the existing VM live migration solution can be applied to virtual BS (vBS) migration needs to be studied because VM live migration always introduces a downtime in principle. In this work, VM migration downtime evaluation methods are proposed, vBS migration downtime is evaluated on VMware and KVM virtualization platform, and helpful results are obtained. vBS live migration is further studied in a companion paper.