CloudRIC demo: Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Virtualization with Shared Heterogeneous Computing

Abstract

Open and virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRANs) are breeding a new market with unprecedented opportunities. However, carrier-grade vRANs today are expensive and energyhungry, as they rely on hardware accelerators (HAs) that are dedicated to individual distributed units (DUs). We demonstrate CloudRIC, a system that, powered by lightweight data-driven models, meets specific reliability targets while (𝑖��) coordinating access between DUs and heterogeneous computing infrastructure; and (𝑖��𝑖��) assisting DUs with compute-aware radio scheduling procedures. Using a user-friendly dashboard to control an experimental testbed remotely, we demonstrate that CloudRIC achieves comparable reliability performance to a DU-dedicated platform while offering up to 40x higher cost-efficiency and up to 6x higher energy efficiency when pooling resources for up to 70 DUs.