  The uplink of a cloud radio access network architecture is studied in which
decoding at the cloud takes place via network function virtualization on
commercial off-the-shelf servers. In order to mitigate the impact of straggling
decoders in this platform, a novel coding strategy is proposed, whereby the
cloud re-encodes the received frames via a linear code before distributing them
to the decoding processors. Transmission of a single frame is considered first,
and upper bounds on the resulting frame unavailability probability as a
function of the decoding latency are derived by assuming a binary symmetric
channel for uplink communications. Then, the analysis is extended to account
for random frame arrival times. In this case, the trade-off between average
decoding latency and the frame error rate is studied for two different queuing
policies, whereby the servers carry out per-frame decoding or continuous
decoding, respectively. Numerical examples demonstrate that the bounds are
useful tools for code design and that coding is instrumental in obtaining a
desirable compromise between decoding latency and reliability.
