RABIA Tarek

PhD graduated
Team : Phare
Departure date : 01/30/2018
https://lip6.fr/Tarek.Rabia

Supervision : Guy PUJOLLE

Virtualization of a Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) Functions

Over the next five years, the new generation of mobile networks (5G) would face a significant growth of the data volume, exchanged between billions of connected objects and applications. Furthermore, the emergence of new technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous driving and augmented reality, imposes higher performance and quality of service (QoS) requirements. Meeting these requirements, while reducing the Capital and Operation Expenditures (CAPEX/OPEX), are the pursued goals of the mobile operators. Consequently, Telcos define a new radio access architecture, called Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). The C-RAN principle is to centralize, within a pool, the processing unit of a radio interface, named BaseBand Unit (BBU). These two units are interconnected through a Fronthaul (FH) network. In this thesis, we design a new partially centralized C-RAN architecture that integrates a virtualization platform, based on a Xen environment, called Metamorphic Network (MNet). Through this architecture, we aim to :

  1. Implement a pool in which physical resources (processors, memory, network ports, etc.) are shared between virtualized BBUs and other applications;
  2. Establish an open FH network that can be used by multiple operators, service providers and third parties to deploy their services and Apps closer to the users for a better Quality of Experience (QoE);
  3. Exploit, through the FH, the existing Ethernet infrastructures to reduce CAPEX/OPEX;
  4. And finally provide the recommended network performance for the 5G.
  5. In the first contribution, we define a new Xen architecture for the MNet platform integrating the packet-processing framework, OpenDataPlane (ODP), within a privileged Xen domain, called "Driver Domain (DD)". This new architecture accelerates the data packet processing within MNet, while avoiding the physical CPUs overuse by ODP. Thus, virtual CPU cores (vCPU) are allocated within DD and are used by ODP to accelerate the packet processing. This new Xen architecture improves the MNet platform by 15%. In the second contribution, we implement two network solutions within the FH. The first solution consist of deploying a layer 2 network protocol, Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL), to connect multiple elements of our C-RAN architecture. The second solution consists of implementing a Software Defined Network (SDN) model managed by Open Network Operating System (ONOS), a distributed SDN controller that is which is virtualized within BBU pool. Moreover, a network performance comparison is performed between these two solutions.

Defence : 01/29/2018

Jury members :

Rami LANGAR, Professeur, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée [Rapporteur]
Nadjib ACHIR, Maître de Conférence, HDR, Université Paris 13 [Rapporteur]
Noëmie SIMONI, Professeur, Ecole supérieure de Télécom ParisTech
Prosper CHEMOUIL, Directeur de recherche, Orange Labs
Stefano SECCI, Maître de conférence, HDR, Sorbonne Université
Mathieu BOUET, Docteur, HDR, Thalès
Guy PUJOLLE, Professeur, Sorbonne Université
Othmen BRAHAM Docteur, Virtuor

Departure date : 01/30/2018

2016-2018 Publications

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