Giannone, F.Kondepu, K.Gupta, H.Civerchia, F.Castoldi, P.Franklin, A.A.Valcarenghi, L.2019-05-282019-08-142019-02-14Giannone, F., Kondepu, K., Gupta, H., Civerchia, F., Castoldi, P., Franklin, A. A. y Valcarenghi, L. (2019). Impact of Virtualisation Technologies on Virtualised RAN Midhaul Latency Budget: A Quantitative Experimental Evaluation. IEEE Communications Letters, 23 (4), pp. 604-6071558-2558https://hdl.handle.net/10016/28425In the Next Generation Radio Access Network (NGRAN) defined by 3GPP for the fifth generation of mobile communications (5G), the next generation NodeB (gNB) is split into a Radio Unit (RU), a Distributed Unit (DU), and a Central Unit (CU). RU, DU, and CU are connected through the fronthaul (RU-DU) and midhaul (DU-CU) segments. If the RAN is also virtualised RAN (VRAN), DU and CU are deployed in virtual machines or containers. Different latency and jitter requirements are demanded on the midhaul according to the distribution of the protocol functions between DU and CU. This study shows that, in VRAN, the virtualisation technologies, the functional split option, and the number of elements deployed in the same computational resource affect the latency budget available for the midhaul. Moreover, it provides an expression for the midhaul allowable latency as a function of the aforementioned parameters. Finally, it shows that, the virtualised DUs featuring a lower layer split option shall be deployed not in the same5eng© 2019 IEEE.5GFunctional splitFronthaulMidhaulVirtualisationresearch articleTelecomunicacioneshttps://www.doi.org/10.1109/LCOMM.2019.2899308open access6044607IEEE Communications Letters23