Home > Communication Service Provider Solutions > Open RAN > White Papers > Accelerating Open RAN Systems: Building Better 5G with the Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card > Dell Technologies’ in-line Open RAN Accelerator Card
Dell Technologies commits to open, standards-based solutions and is leading this industry-wide initiative by working closely with O-RAN standards bodies and an open network ecosystem of partners to bring advanced, best-of-breed Open RAN solutions to the market. In developing its Open RAN solutions, Dell Technologies recognized that to improve performance, the vDU hardware must process Layer 1 operations more efficiently. In partnership with Marvell Technology, Dell developed an Open RAN accelerator card that could offload and process all Layer 1 functions using an in-line (versus traditional “look-aside”) method. This method eliminates the back-and-forth processing of earlier Open RAN/vRAN models. By shifting the Layer 1 processing to the in-line accelerator card, the vDU’s CPU is free to focus on Layer 2 processing. The result performs better than the appliance-based BBUs found in traditional RAN systems (see Figure 2).
The in-line accelerator card features digital signal processors (DSPs) and Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) core processors that are uniquely suited to Layer 1 processing requirements. In benchmark testing of real-world RAN workloads, the Open RAN accelerator card offloaded almost 70% of the overall traffic from the server CPU. This dramatically frees up CPU resources to process the Layer 2 traffic—enhancing performance and increasing the overall scale of the solution. The Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card helps reduce the required number of server CPU cores, which in turn reduces overall power consumption and costs.