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radisys.com 27 Radisys Series — Who Disaggregated My RAN? eBook The Hardware Question RAN products demand high performance hardware, including the processors that can perform compute intensive tasks while being power optimal and specialized hardware for certain functions and other aspects like cooling, power consumption and environmental readiness. Processors—At its most basic level, performance of the products depend on the processors to a great extent. Like most traditional solutions, Open RAN solutions are driven by x86 or Arm-based general purpose processors (GPPs). By choosing appropriate GPP based servers, operators can easily find solutions which match traditional solutions and meet their performance needs. The processor companies are also addressing the Open RAN market requirements by releasing processor variants with extra smarts needed for some of the intensive compute operations typical of a RAN product. Hardware Acceleration—Open RAN solutions are increasing performance through hardware accelerators like field- programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). While targeted for specific, custom functions, these hardware accelerators are commercial off-the-shelf products and are widely used by vendors, including traditional ones. Selecting the right chipsets and integrating them correctly is key to achieving top performance. Other Hardware Aspects—Power consumption and cooling are hardware considerations operators must take into account. The power consumption of a solution is an important metric because the correct power must be ensured at the cell sites. There are limits to how much power can be made available and hence a proper understanding of a solution's power consumption profile is essential. Cooling becomes an important aspect as processors have different cooling needs; choosing one processor over another may have an impact on cooling. Additionally, the environmental conditions for the deployment, the high and low temperature range, and its impact on the enclosure, must also be considered when selecting a server package for deployment. Low Latency OS and Network Processing After the hardware considerations are evaluated, there are performance factors to be considered stemming from the software side of the solution. Real-time Operating System—There are many standard versions of the Linux operating system (OS) available for deployment. By using real-time Linux flavors hardened for RAN/edge deployment, and you can achieve low latency in the operating systems. These real-time Linux OSs have been tuned to perform better than general Linux, allowing Open RAN solutions to perform in-line with those from traditional vendors. Even in cloudified RAN implementations, such high-performance OSs are needed to obtain high performance. Fast Data Path—The rate at which data comes into the RAN and goes back out to the network is an essential part of measuring performance. There have been tremendous gains in performance and high throughput of packets

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