Performance evaluation of offloading LDPC decoding to an FPGA in 5G baseband processing

Offloading of computationally expensive physical layer processing such as the forward error correction, is one of the key enablers for a fully virtualized open radio access network (RAN). In this paper we show such an offloading architecture and will demonstrate it using the OpenAirInterface 5G New Radio open source software and the Xilinx T1 telco accelerator card. We will show the feasibility and the potential savings of such an architecture.