An intensive vRAN deployment with OpenAirInterface

TL;DR

This paper details the adaptation and scaling of the OpenAirInterface 5G vRAN software stack on various computer architectures to enable intensive deployment and improve performance.

Contribution

It presents software stack modifications and deployment strategies for efficient, large-scale 5G vRAN implementation on different hardware architectures.

Findings

Performance improvements from software stack adaptations

Insights into hardware architecture effects on vRAN deployment

Identification of limitations and future directions for vRAN scaling

Abstract

The advent of 5G virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRANs) brings a new challenge with regards to computer architectures. It requires to select or design computing technologies that provide a sufficient level of performance while maximizing the flexibility and efficiency of the implemented networks. Several solutions addressing this challenge were proposed, relying on general purpose processors as well as hardware accelerators. This work describes our effort to enable an intensive vRAN deployment using the 5G software stack OpenAirInterface on top of these computer architectures. We had to adapt the software stack to leverage the capabilities of hardware and to find how to scale up the vRAN deployment with several vRAN instances sharing a server. We describe in this work our improvements to the stack and their effect on performance. We also share our observations on the behavior of the computer architectures and how they affect our deployment. We finally discuss the limitations of our deployment and further efforts to implement better vRAN deployments.