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.
@article{arxiv.2305.09588,
title = {Hardware Acceleration for Open Radio Access Networks: A Contemporary Overview},
author = {Lopamudra Kundu and Xingqin Lin and Elena Agostini and Vikrama Ditya},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.09588},
year = {2023}
}