Cellular Access Multi-Tenancy through Small Cell Virtualization and Common RF Front-End Sharing

Mobile traffic demand is expected to grow as much as eight-fold in the coming next five years, putting strain in current wireless infrastructure. One of the most common means for matching these mounting requirements is through network densification, essentially increasing the density of deployment of operators' base stations. In this paper we take a step in that direction by implementing a virtualized base station consisting of multiple, isolated LTE PHY stacks running concurrently on top of a hypervisor deployed on a cheap, off-the-shelf x86 server and a shared radio head. In particular, we show that it is possible to run multiple virtualized base stations while achieving throughput equal or close to the theoretical maximum.