Virtualized radio access networks (vRAN) enable network operators to run RAN functions on commodity servers instead of proprietary hardware. It has garnered significant interest due to its ability to reduce costs, provide deployment flexibility, and offer other benefits, particularly for operators of 5G private networks. However, the non-deterministic computing platforms pose difficulties to effective quality of service (QoS) provision, especially in the case of hybrid deployment of time-critical and throughput-demanding applications. Existing approaches including network slicing and other resource management schemes fail to provide fine-grained and effective QoS support at the User Equipments level. In this paper, we propose UQ-vRAN, a UE-level QoS provision framework. UQ-vRAN presents the first comprehensive analysis of the complicated impacts among key network parameters, e.g., network function splitting, resource block allocation, and modulation/coding scheme selection and builds an accurate and comprehensive network model. UQ-vRAN also provides a fast network configurator which gives feasible configurations in seconds, making it possible to be practical in actual 5G vRAN. We implement UQ-vRAN on OpenAirInterface and use simulation and testbed-base experiments to evaluate it. Results show that compared with existing works, UQ-vRAN reduces the QoS satisfaction ratio by 17%–40% under various network settings, while minimizing the total energy consumption.
