학술논문

Moving NFV Toward the Antenna Through FPGA-Based Hardware Reconfiguration
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Communications Letters IEEE Commun. Lett. Communications Letters, IEEE. 27(1):342-346 Jan, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Encoding
Reconfigurable architectures
Field programmable gate arrays
5G mobile communication
Satellite broadcasting
Hardware
Quadrature amplitude modulation
5G
6G
NFV
C-RAN
FPGA
Language
ISSN
1089-7798
1558-2558
2373-7891
Abstract
This paper presents a system architecture and design, enabling hardware level virtualization for radio units in a 5G and beyond Cloud Radio Access Networks environment. This aims to increase system flexibility and reconfigurability, bringing Network Function Virtualization closer to the antenna, leveraging the Hardware as a Service concept. Using Field Programmable Gate Array partial reconfiguration capabilities, an architecture was designed with independent transmission channels capable of dynamically change waveforms depending on user requirements, while maintaining the core system running. It was achieved an Error Vector Magnitude below 1.4% for sub-6 GHz frequencies and a channel reconfiguration time below 8 ms.