SACCESS: Towards A Software Acceleration Framework for 5G Radio Access Networks

While the deployment of 5G mobile networks is still in its early stage, we are currently experiencing a paradigm shift towards Open Radio Access Network (RAN) architectures. In this context, RAN solutions that are heavily designed on software can reduce the implementation cost and time-to-market, as well as increase flexibility by making such solutions 'future-ready' through enabling new features, such as new advanced signal processing algorithms, to be included even via a simple software update. Realization of software-based RANs enabled by this paradigm shift, although attractive is however non-trivial, especially the realization of physical layer which mandates fast and efficient processing to meet strict real-time requirements. In this direction, we propose in this work a specialized acceleration software solution (SACCESS) to accelerate computationally expensive physical layer processing operations. We show that SACCESS can provide a slot processing speed-up of over 2.2, compared to OpenAirInterface (OAI) which emerged as one of the most advanced software-based 5G-NR RAN solutions available to a wider community. Our results demonstrate, for first time, that a peak throughput for a 40MHz TDD and FDD single antenna 5G-NR system based on OAI's development can be achieved without any hardware acceleration.