Mobile traffic demand is expected to grow as much as eight-fold in the coming next five years, putting strain in current wireless infrastructures . Meanwhile the diversity of traffic and standards may explode as well. One of the most common means for matching these mounting requirements is through network densification , essentially increasing the density of deployment of operators’ base stations in many small cells and handling timing critical traffic at the edge. In this paper we take a step in that direction by implementing a virtualized small cell base station consisting of multiple, isolated LTE PHY stacks running concurrently on top of a hypervisor deployed on a cheap, off-the-shelf x86 server and a shared radio head. In particular, we show that it is possible to run multiple virtualized base stations while achieving throughput equal or close to the theoretical maximum. In contrast to C-RAN (Cloud/Centralized Radio Access Network), our virtualized small cell base station has full stack at the edge so that a low latency high throughput front-haul, which is necessary in C-RAN architecture, is not needed. This approach brings all the flexibility and configurability (from network management point of view) that a software based implementation provides while the transparent architecture enables the possibility of multiple standards sharing the same radio infrastructure.

Containers are in great demand because they are lightweight when compared to virtual machines. On the downside, containers offer weaker isolation than VMs, to the point where people run containers in virtual machines to achieve proper isolation. In this paper, we examine whether there is indeed a strict tradeoff between isolation (VMs) and efficiency (containers). We find that VMs can be as nimble as containers, as long as they are small and the toolstack is fast enough.

Video streaming dominates the Internet's overall traffic mix, with reports stating that it will constitute 90% of all consumer traffic by 2019. Most of this video is delivered by Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and, while they optimize QoE metrics such as buffering ratio and start-up time, no single CDN provides optimal performance. In this paper we make the case for elastic CDNs, the ability to build virtual CDNs on-the-fly on top of shared, third-party infrastructure at a scale. To bring this idea closer to reality we begin by large-scale simulations to quantify the effects that elastic CDNs would have if deployed, and build and evaluate MiniCache, a specialized, minimalistic virtualized content cache that runs on the Xen hypervisor. MiniCache is able to serve content at rates of up to 32 Gb/s and handle up to 600K reqs/sec on a single CPU core, as well as boot in about 90 milliseconds on x86 and around 370 milliseconds on ARM32.