A Study on Virtual BS Live Migration - C Part II: A Seamless and Lossless Mechanism for Virtual BS Migration

The cloud radio access network (Cloud RAN), which is characterized by centralized baseband units (BBU), has attracted research interests from the cellular industry. The centralized BBU pool makes it possible to build a green RAN by consolidating multiple virtual basestations (vBS) with low processing load onto a single BBU. vBS live migration is an enabling technology for vBS consolidation. It is shown in a companion paper that the existing virtual machine live migration solution introduces a service interruption time of several seconds, which is unacceptable for real-time services carried by the BSs. In this paper we propose and develop a seamless and lossless mechanism for vBS live migration. The experiment results show that the proposed solution for vBS live migration introduces a service interruption time of tens of milliseconds and ensures no loss of user data during vBS migration, which significantly outperforms the commercial virtual machine live migration solution.