Nexus: Efficient and Scalable Multi-Cell mmWave Baseband Processing with Heterogeneous Compute
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The rapid adoption of 5G New Radio (NR), particularly in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, imposes stringent demands on baseband processing efficiency. While virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRANs) enable dynamic spectrum sharing, compute resource allocation for baseband processing, especially in multi-cell deployments, remains underexplored. In this paper, we present Nexus, the first system to realize real-time, virtualized multi-cell mmWave baseband processing on a single server with heterogeneous compute resources. For single-cell operation, Nexus employs a random forest (RAF)-based model to predict energy-efficient resource allocations with microsecond-level inference latency. For multi-cell scenarios, Nexus introduces a power-aware scheduler that incorporates a lightweight contention model to adapt allocations under concurrent execution. Through extensive evaluations, we show that Nexus supports up to sixteen concurrent cells under full load, achieving 5.37 Gbps aggregate throughput using sixteen CPU cores and a single physical ACC100 accelerator virtualized into sixteen virtual functions (VFs), while reducing the multi-cell scheduling search space by orders of magnitude.
Authors: Zhenzhou Qi, Chung-Hsuan Tung, Zhihui Gao, Tingjun Chen
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4414759016
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