Towards Energy Efficient RAN: From Industry Standards to Trending Practice

As 5G deployments continue throughout the world, concerns regarding its energy consumption have gained significant traction. This article focuses on radio access networks (RANs) which account for a major portion of the network energy use. Firstly, we introduce the state-of-the-art 3GPP and O-RAN standardization work on enhancing RAN energy efficiency. Then we highlight three unique ways for enabling energy optimization in telecommunication networks, including full stack acceleration, network functions consolidation, and shared infrastructure between communication and artificial intelligence. These network design strategies not only allow for considerable overall reduction in the energy footprint, but also deliver several added benefits including improved throughput, reduced cost of ownership, and increased revenue opportunities for telcos.

Hardware Acceleration for Open Radio Access Networks: A Contemporary Overview

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.