Enabling and Scaling of URLLC Verticals on 5G vRAN Running on COTS Hardware

This article discusses an Ultra-Reliable Low-La-tency Communication (URLLC) implementation on a 5G New Radio (NR) virtual radio access Network (vRAN). The vRAN application runs on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) test platform, on which 3GPP 5G NR RAN Layer-1 (L1) and Layer-2 (L2) containerized network functions (CNFs) are implemented. To demonstrate capability and scalability, the CNFs are dimensioned to support up to three 100 MHz cells. URLLC and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) slices are implemented to partition L1 processing for mixed use cases. This article illustrates an advantage of virtualization in managing L1 processing demand by L1 slice-scaling. It also describes a methodology for optimal cell capacity dimensioning based on connected URLLC users' service level agreements (SLAs) in terms of latency, reliability, and throughput. Using analysis of the test results, the article discusses maintaining a critical time budget of downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) L1 processing pipelines and points out techniques to increase L1 processing capacity to achieve URLLC SLA while serving eMBB users. The article concludes that a 5G NR vRAN application running on COTS hardware enables public/private URLLC verticals including mobile edge computing, cloud gaming, AR/VR, industrial automation, and others.