A study on virtual BS live migration — A seamless and lossless mechanism for virtual BS migration

Virtual basestation (vBS) live migration is an enabling technology for reducing the power consumption of the baseband unit (BBU) pool of the cloud radio access network (Cloud RAN). Our previous work shows that using the existing virtual machine live migration solutions for vBS migration will introduce a service interruption time of several seconds, which is unacceptable for real-time services carried by basestations. 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 solutions.