An open, programmable, multi-vendor 5G O-RAN testbed with NVIDIA ARC and OpenAirInterface

Villa, Davide; Khan, Imran; Kaltenberger, Florian; Hedberg, Nicholas; Soares da Silva, Ruben; Kelkar, Anupa; Dick, Chris; Basagni, Stefano; Jornet, Josep M. ; Melodia, Tommaso; Polese, Michele; Koutsonikolas, Dimitrios
INFOCOM 2024, 2nd IEEE Workshop on Next-generation Open and Programmable Radio Access Networks (NG-OPERA), 20-23 May 2024, Vancouver, Canada

Runner-up Best Paper Award

The transition of fifth generation (5G) cellular systems to softwarized, programmable, and intelligent networks depends on successfully enabling public and private 5G deployments that are (i) fully software-driven and (ii) with a performance at par with that of traditional monolithic systems. This requires hardware acceleration to scale the Physical (PHY) layer performance, end-to-end integration and testing, and careful planning of the Radio Frequency (RF) environment. In this paper, we describe how the X5G testbed at Northeastern University has addressed these challenges through the first 8-node network deployment of the NVIDIA Aerial Research Cloud (ARC), with the Aerial SDK for the PHY layer, accelerated on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and through its integration with higher layers from the OpenAirInterface (OAI) open-source project through the Small Cell Forum Functional Application Platform Interface (FAPI). We discuss software integration, the network infrastructure, and a digital twin framework for RF planning. We then profile the performance with up to 4 Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) smartphones for each base station with iPerf and video streaming applications, measuring a cell rate higher than 500 Mbps in downlink and 45 Mbps in uplink.


DOI
Type:
Conference
City:
Vancouver
Date:
2024-05-20
Department:
Communication systems
Eurecom Ref:
7494
Copyright:
© 2024 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/7494