Real-time software architectures and performance evaluation methods for 5G radio systems

The thesis deals with 5G real-time Software Defined Radio architectures. In order to match 5G performance requirements, computational acceleration combined with real-time process scheduling methods are required. In 5G embedded systems acceleration amounts to a judicious combination additional hardware units for the most computationally costly functions with software for simpler arithmetic and complex control procedures. Fully software-based solutions are also appearing for certain applications, in particular in the so-called Open Radio-Access Network (openRAN) ecosystem. The contributions of this thesis lie in methods for purely software-based acceleration and real-time control of low-latency fronthaul interfaces. Since 5G has stringent latency requirements and support for very high-speed data traffic, methods for scheduling baseband processing need to be tailored to the specifics of the air-interface. Specifically, we propose a functional decomposition of the 5G air interface which is amenable to multi-core software implementations targeting high-end servers exploiting single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) acceleration. Moreover, we provide some avenues for multi-threaded processing through pipelining and the use of thread pools.   We highlight the methods and their performance evaluation that have been exploited during the development of the OpenAirInterface 5G implementation.