Optimizing the Micro-Architectural Performance of the Current and Emerging Edge Infrastructure

The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is the essential technology proposed to tackle the next-generation mobile system’s various flexibility features. In this article, we implement a thorough micro-architectural performance investigation on the NFV-enabled edge virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) and the emerging 5G new-radio (nr) platform to unveil the main micro-architectural bottlenecks of the next-generation network’s vRAN system. Based on our experimental results, we find that the high core bound hinders the processing speed of the vRAN and 5G nr platforms. Several solutions alleviating the vRAN’s core bound are proposed to accelerate the vRAN system’s processing speed. Besides, we observe that the current co-location strategy cannot maximize the COTS servers’ CPU utilization and meanwhile eliminate the system hang-up caused by CPU resource contention. We fill this gap by proposing an optimized co-location strategy based on our observed vRAN co-location characterization. Finally, we detect that on the modern hyper-threading-enabled COTS servers, the current pin core policy of 5G nr will cause L3 cache contention, which will lead to severe system hang-up. A novel threads management mechanism is proposed to eliminate this system hang-up on the hyper-threading-enabled COTS servers.