2023/05/16 by Kundu, Lopamudra, Lin, Xingqin, Agostini, Elena +1 · 2 citations
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.09588
Radio access networks (RAN) are going through a paradigm shift towards interoperable, intelligent, software-defined, and cloud-native open RAN solutions. A key challenge towards the adoption and deployment of open RAN at scale is performance. Hence, it is critical to leverage the power of hardware acceleration to offload compute-heavy RAN workloads to specialized hardware devices to enable accelerated compute for open RAN deployments. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art overview of hardware acceleration for open RAN in the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. We also present a practical implementation of inline hardware acceleration for open RAN layer 1 processing and identify several areas for future exploration towards the sixth generation (6G) wireless networks.