Hardware Acceleration for Open Radio Access Networks: A Contemporary Overview

Radio access networks (RAN) are experiencing a paradigm shift toward interoperable, intelligent, software-defined, and cloud-native open RAN solutions. A key challenge toward the adoption and deployment of open RAN at scale is performance, since commercial RAN must meet stringent requirements in terms of capacity, data rate, latency, coverage, energy efficiency, reliability, and security, among others. To overcome the performance challenge, 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 an overview of state of the art hardware acceleration for open RAN in the fifth generation (5G) cellular networks by reviewing RAN architectural evolution, presenting the role of hardware acceleration in RAN, and introducing the latest O-RAN Alliance's development of acceleration abstraction layer. We also present a practical implementation of inline hardware acceleration for open RAN layer 1 processing and identify several areas for future exploration.