Centralization of BBUs without virtualization achieves some of these above-described benefits, but may be further improved. For example and as described in the Background Section, a vBBU according to the state of the art keeps a tightly-coupled radio/backhaul protocol stacks, which makes it difficult to provide a truly flexible and controllable path between radio and backhaul (or edge cloud) parts of the vBBU in the cloud environment. For example, in a distributed cloud with distributed evolved packet cores (EPCs), the vBBU of each e-NodeB needs to be connected to (or shared by) different physical/logical backhaul links to the EPCs (or edge clouds).

Decoupling of radio and backhaul protocol stacks would allow the EPCs to be truly separated from the radio protocol stack and therefore be scaled independently of the radio protocol stacks of the vBBUs to realize the “infinite” resource notion in EPC core. Hereinafter, example embodiments will be described for realizing the mentioned decoupling of the radio and backhaul protocol stacks as well as managing communications therebetween.

FIG. 1 illustrates a wireless communication network including a virtualized baseband unit, according to an example embodiment.