Radio access networks (RAN) are going through a paradigm shift towards interoperable, intelligent, software-defined, and cloud-native open RAN solutions. A key challenge towards the adoption and deployment of open RAN at scale is performance. Hence, it is critical to leverage the power of hardware acceleration to offload compute-heavy RAN workloads to specialized hardware devices to enable accelerated compute for open RAN deployments. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art overview of hardware acceleration for open RAN in the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. We also present a practical implementation of inline hardware acceleration for open RAN layer 1 processing and identify several areas for future exploration towards the sixth generation (6G) wireless networks.

翻译：无线接入网（RAN）正经历一场范式转变，向可互操作、智能化、软件定义及云原生的开放RAN解决方案演进。大规模部署与采用开放RAN的关键挑战在于性能。为此，亟需利用硬件加速能力，将计算密集型RAN负载卸载至专用硬件设备，从而为开放RAN部署提供加速计算支持。本文对第五代（5G）无线网络中开放RAN的硬件加速技术进行了最新综述。同时，我们展示了开放RAN层1处理中内联硬件加速的实用实现方案，并针对第六代（6G）无线网络指出了若干未来研究方向。