Cloud Native Hardware Accelerated 5G virtualized Radio Access Network

Abstract

Cloud Radio Access Network consists in deporting and pooling radio processing on shared servers for a better use of computing resources, more agile operations, and thus optimizing costs and energy performance. Some of these processes at the radio physical layer are highly demanding in terms of computing power, which implies high energy consumption. Our approach enables the automatic activation of hardware programmable acceleration resources that are better suited to these processes in terms of performance and energy efficiency. Low-Density Parity-Check Forward Error Correction functions standardized in 5th Generation of Mobile Networks are offloaded on these hardware acceleration resources. Kubernetes-based orchestration is made compatible with the use of a edge computing accelerated heterogeneous infrastructure (CPU, GPU, FPGA) that can be distributed at the edge of the operator’s network to deploy the RAN Distributed Unit. We assess the proof-of-concept implementation of our approach and evaluate cost in data offloading and energy consumption. This prefigures a full cloud orchestration for 5G access, such as recommended in the O-RAN consortium.