The rapid adoption of 5G New Radio (NR), particularly in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, imposes stringent demands on the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency of baseband processing. While virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRANs) enable dynamic spectrum sharing across cells, compute resource allocation for baseband processing, especially in multi-cell deployments with heterogeneous workloads, 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. NEXUS integrates software-based digital signal processing pipelines with hardware-accelerated LDPC decoding, and introduces a novel framework for sharing Intel's ACC100 eASIC across multiple CPU cores via virtual functions (VFs). For single-cell operation, NEXUS employs a random forest (RAF)-based model that predicts the most energy-efficient resource allocation for the given cell configuration with microsecond-level inference latency and high accuracy. For multi-cell scenarios, NEXUS introduces a power-aware scheduler that incorporates a lightweight contention model to adjust resource allocation strategies under concurrent execution. Through extensive evaluation across various Frequency Range 2 (FR2) cell configurations, we show that NEXUS supports up to 16 concurrent cells under full load, achieving 5.37Gbps aggregate throughput, while reducing the multi-cell scheduling search space by orders of magnitude. These results demonstrate that virtualized, resource-aware baseband processing is both practical and efficient for next-generation vRAN systems.

翻译：5G新空口（NR）的快速部署，特别是毫米波（mmWave）频谱的应用，对基带处理的灵活性、可扩展性和效率提出了严格要求。虽然虚拟化无线接入网（vRAN）实现了跨小区的动态频谱共享，但针对基带处理的计算资源分配——尤其是在具有异构工作负载的多小区部署场景中——仍未得到充分研究。本文提出NEXUS，这是首个在单台服务器上利用异构计算资源实现实时虚拟化多小区毫米波基带处理的系统。NEXUS将基于软件的数字信号处理流水线与硬件加速的LDPC解码相结合，并通过虚拟功能（VFs）引入了一种在多个CPU核心间共享英特尔ACC100 eASIC的创新框架。针对单小区场景，NEXUS采用基于随机森林（RAF）的预测模型，能够以微秒级推理延迟和高精度预测给定小区配置下最节能的资源分配方案。对于多小区场景，NEXUS设计了功耗感知调度器，该调度器集成轻量级竞争模型以动态调整并发执行环境下的资源分配策略。通过对多种频段范围2（FR2）小区配置的广泛评估，我们证明NEXUS在满负载条件下可支持多达16个并发小区，实现5.37Gbps的总吞吐量，同时将多小区调度搜索空间降低数个数量级。这些结果表明，面向下一代vRAN系统的虚拟化资源感知基带处理方案兼具实用性与高效性。