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The virtualization of mobile network functions constitutes one of the main blocks for addressing the high flexibility requirements of fifth generation (5G) communication systems. Reconfigurable hotspots are expected to be massively deployed to enable on-demand services and dynamically adapt the network capacity according to traffic requirements. In this paper, we present the extensions and modifications of the long term evolution (LTE) module of the ns-3 simulator (LENA) to include a software defined radio (SDR) physical layer implementation. These extensions combine the native flexibility of the simulator with the SDR features of a real-time prototype. Moreover, the framework was designed to distribute the communication functions across different elements of the network with the possibility of adjusting several transmission parameters as in a network function virtualization (NFV) paradigm. Thanks to an emulated full network protocol stack, the prototype allows the experimentation of novel 5G solutions and the evaluation of relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) from the lower layer protocols up to application level. To this aim, we present the experimental evaluation of the KPIs of energy, latency, throughput and reconfiguration time in relevant scenarios. ; Grant numbers : projects partially supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR 1551 and 2014 SGR 1397) and by the Spanish Government under project TEC2014-58341-C4-4-R and TEC2017-88373-R. © 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Cloud-based radio access networks (C-RAN) are expected to face important challenges in the forthcoming fifth generation (5G) communication systems. For this reason, more flexible C-RAN architectures have recently been proposed in the literature, where the radio communication stack is partitioned and placed across different RAN nodes to tackle the 5G capacity and latency requirements. In this paper, we show that this functional split also supports energy efficiency, especially when it is combined with bandwidth adaptation. To this aim, we have built a dynamic hotspot prototype, where the hardware-accelerated physical-layer is placed in the remote radio head, and higher software-based layers are placed in a server (either directly connected or remotely accessible). This setup allowed us to experimentally evaluate the power consumption of key hardware modules when adapting the bandwidth and the modulation and coding scheme. The real-time operation of the testbed allows further experimentation with different 5G use cases and the evaluation of other key performance indicators. ; Grant numbers : The work of CTTC was also partially supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR-1551) and by the Spanish Government under project AETHER (TEC2014-58341-C4-4-R).© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.