Quantifying multiplexing gains in a Wireless Network Cloud

The Wireless Network Cloud (WNC) [1] is a novel network architecture where wireless base-stations are implemented as software modules and multiple base-stations are consolidated to a single centralized computing platform. Due to the time-varying and random nature of base-station traffic, consolidation leads to multiplexing of statistically-varying basestation loads on a common hardware platform. In turn, this can lead to significant hardware reduction in the consolidated platform when compared to the distributed network. This paper represents the first analysis of such consolidation gain. Through traffic simulation experiments, we quantify the extent and variation of this multiplexing gain in a WiMAX base-station network in different traffic conditions. We show experimentally, that the obtained gain increases linearly with network size (number of base-stations). Further, we also show that the consolidation gain is higher when the consolidated base-stations face higher traffic intensity.