Joint allocation strategies for radio and processing resources in virtual radio access networks (V-RAN)

We consider in this paper a heterogeneous wireless network where the cell sites, known as Remote Radio Heads, are connected to a central processing unit composed of a pool of Base Band Units, so-called Virtual-Radio Access Network (V-RAN). We evaluate its performance, in terms of user flow throughput, system stability and fairness under two resource allocation strategies: Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) and a heuristic based on Proportional Fairness (PF), which we apply locally on each access network; both allocations being applied jointly on radio and processing resources. We consider the case when the V-RAN is restrictive in terms of processing resources as compared to the radio ones, and compare it to the case when the V-RAN is not restrictive. Our results show that locally-applied PF achieves higher throughput and system stability than DRF, which achieves better fairness.