As 5G networks evolve to meet the growing demands for high data rates, low latency, and superior quality of service, hardware acceleration becomes essential for managing computationally intensive tasks. This paper demonstrates an implementation of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols (both downlink and uplink transmission) using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), offloading the execution of these critical Low-Physical Layer (Low-PHY) functions away from the general-purpose CPU approach found in the open-source mobile software platform OpenAirInterface (OAI). The full integration of FPGA-generated OFDM symbols with an Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework and the OAI protocol stack yields significant performance improvements, including a a 90% processing time reduction compared to the traditional CPU-based implementation. This demonstration highlights the effectiveness of FPGA acceleration in enhancing the efficiency of 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) functions implemented by open-source efforts, thus offering a path forward to implementing additional Low-PHY functions on accelerated hardware.

Smart living applications represent a significant group of 5G vertical use cases. For the most part, these use cases require mobile network connectivity and service high-availability. Simply put, two essential requirements for these applications are short connection time and uninterrupted user data service. Coupled with the expectation of supporting billions of connected devices, these requirements can be achieved by exploiting New Generation Radio Access Network (NG-RAN) architectures. One such emerging architecture is Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN), whose Next Generation NodeB (gNB) functions are physically decoupled into distinct entities, such as Radio Unit (RU), Distributed Unit (DU), and Central Unit (CU). The CUs are connected to 5G Core Network (CN) and are likely to be virtualized and distributed across multiple (micro and macro) data centers. The virtualized CUs (vCUs) are further decoupled into virtualized CU Control-Plane (vCU-CP) and virtualized CU User-Plane (vCU-UP) to increase flexibility and scalability. As these 5G RAN entities are virtualized, various resiliency schemes, such as container migration, must be considered to overcome possible congestion in or malfunction of the hosting server.In this paper, two distinct cloud-native RAN resiliency scenarios are evaluated while live-migrating gNB-vCU-CP with the objective of maintaining User Equipment (UE) connection time short and user data service uninterrupted in support of smart living and other advanced applications.

Intermittent systems on energy-harvesting devices have to frequently back up data because of an unreliable energy supply to make forward progress. These devices come with non-volatile memories like Flash/FRAM on board that are used to back up the system state. However, quite paradoxically, writing to a non-volatile memory consumes a lot of energy that makes backups expensive. Idem-potency violations inherent to intermittent programs are major contributors to the problem, as they render system state inconsistent and force backups to occur even when plenty of energy is available. In this work, we first characterize the complex persist dependencies that are unique to intermittent computing. Based on these insights, we propose NvMR, an intermittent architecture that eliminates idempotency violations in the program by renaming non-volatile memory addresses. This can reduce the number of backups to their theoretical minimum and decouple the decision of when to perform backups from the memory access constraints imposed by the program. Our evaluations show that compared to a state-of-the-art intermittent architecture, NvMR can save about 20% energy on average when running common embedded applications.

The 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture provides a split option, whereby a gNodeB Central Unit (gNB-CU) is connected to one or more gNB-Distributed Units (gNB- DUs). The CU is in turn connected to the 5G Core Network (CN) and its functions can be virtualized through software containers. This demonstration showcases live migration of a containerized Central Unit (CU) component in a Cloud-native 5G network without loss of service. In terms of resiliency, virtual function live migration can circumvent the failure of the server hosting the gNB-virtualized CU (gNB-vCU) that would otherwise cause an interruption of user-plane (UP) traffic and disconnection of User Equipment (UE). The proposed gNB-vCU container live migration technique reduces the end-user service temporary downtime by 50% when compared to the traditional backup/restore option.