The advent of 5G virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRANs) brings a new challenge with regards to computer architectures. It requires to select or design computing technologies that provide a sufficient level of performance while maximizing the flexibility and efficiency of the implemented networks. Several solutions addressing this challenge were proposed, relying on general purpose processors as well as hardware accelerators. This work describes our effort to enable an intensive vRAN deployment using the 5G software stack OpenAirInterface on top of these computer architectures. We had to adapt the software stack to leverage the capabilities of hardware and to find how to scale up the vRAN deployment with several vRAN instances sharing a server. We describe in this work our improvements to the stack and their effect on performance. We also share our observations on the behavior of the computer architectures and how they affect our deployment. We finally discuss the limitations of our deployment and further efforts to implement better vRAN deployments.

翻译：第五代移动通信虚拟化无线接入网（vRAN）的出现为计算机架构带来了新的挑战。这要求选择或设计能够提供足够性能水平，同时最大化所实现网络灵活性和效率的计算技术。针对这一挑战，已有多种解决方案被提出，它们既依赖通用处理器也使用硬件加速器。本文描述了我们利用5G软件栈OpenAirInterface在上述计算机架构上实现密集vRAN部署的工作。我们必须调整软件栈以充分利用硬件能力，并探索如何通过在同一服务器上共享多个vRAN实例来扩展vRAN部署规模。本文阐述了我们对软件栈的改进及其对性能的影响，同时分享了关于计算机架构行为及其如何影响部署的观察。最后，我们讨论了当前部署的局限性以及未来实现更优vRAN部署的进一步工作。