An erlang implementation of a scalable node B control unit

Abstract

The demand of mobile data traffic is increasing due to the popularization of advanced mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets and to the generalization of the use of mobile Internet. The Node B is one of the main elements of the control plane of the UMTS network. It is responsible for the tasks directly connected to the radio interface and provides the physical radio link between the mobile devices and the network. This master thesis presents a design of the Node B control unit that can handle multiple requests concurrently and scale both by the number of cores and the cards. Additionally, analyzes the suitability of using a high level language such as Erlang for implementing the Node B control unit. To achieve these objectives, a prototype of the Node B control unit that can handle requests concurrently and scale by the number of cores and cards has been designed and implemented with Erlang. The developed prototype shows that implementing a concurrent and scalable Node B control unit with Erlang is completely feasible and the tests that have been carried out demonstrate that the performance and scalability of the system are good. Furthermore, some realistic deployment scenarios of an Erlang implementation of the Node B control unit over the real hardware used in the Radio Base Station at Ericsson have been discussed and they show that it is completely possible to use Erlang for implementing the Node B control unit.