Speaker
Description
The expansion of cellular networks, specifically 5G, beyond the limits of Earth into Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) is one of the hottest topics in cellular communications today. By employing space- and air-borne base stations, the term “no service” could become obsolete, enabling critical services for maritime, aeronautical, and disaster-affected regions. Despite its potential, the practical realization of space-bound components entails formidable challenges due to hazardous radiation and energy constraints.
We present a concept that builds on space-qualified hardware technology. By exploiting a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), ASIC-like vector processors, and a CPU on a heterogeneous processing platform, we realize a partly hardware-accelerated gNodeB based on a heavily modified OpenAirInterface low Earth orbit branch. Our benchmarks show that offloading computationally intensive physical layer signal processing operations, as well as RF frontend-related protocol handling, to the FPGA is essential for achieving the required 5G data rates and significantly higher energy efficiency compared to a CPU-only implementation. Our findings imply that future efforts should primarily focus on offloading additional processing-intensive components. A discussion on further steps towards core network integration concludes this paper.
| Talk Length | 30 Minutes |
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