What is NVIDIA Aerial™ CUDA-Accelerated RAN?

NVIDIA Aerial™ CUDA-Accelerated RAN is an application framework for building commercial-grade, software-defined, GPU-accelerated, cloud-native 5G/6G networks. It enables a fully cloud-native virtual 5G RAN solution to support a wide range of next-generation edge AI and RAN services using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.

The platform supports full inline GPU acceleration of layer 1 (cuPHY) and GPU accelerated functions of layer 2 (cuMAC) of the 5G/6G stack. It supports a full stack framework for a gNB integration L2/L3 (MAC, RLC, PDCP), along with manageability and orchestration. Aerial CUDA-Accelerated RAN also supports non 5G signal processing use cases.

The NVIDIA Aerial™ CUDA-Accelerated RAN package simplifies building programmable and scalable software-defined 5G vRAN using COTS servers with NVIDIA GPUs and has been deployed in commercial and research networks.

What is in this Collection?

The NVIDIA Aerial™ CUDA-Accelerated RAN collection includes the source code and a single Docker container comprised of:

• Aerial cuPHY:  Aerial cuPHY is a cloud-native, software-defined platform optimized to run 5G/6G-compatible gNB physical layer (L1/PHY) workloads on NVIDIA DPU/NIC and GPU hardware.
• Aerial cuMAC:  Aerial cuMAC, a Layer 2 MAC scheduler acceleration library, is developed to improve spectral efficiency by introducing a multi-cell scheduler with enhanced algorithms within Layer 2 of the RAN protocol stack.
• pyAerial:  pyAerial is a Python library of physical layer components that can be used as part of the workflow in taking a design from simulation to real-time operation.
• Aerial Data Lake:  Aerial Data Lake can be used in conjunction with the NVIDIA pyAerial library to generate training data for layer-1 pipelines built on neural networks.
• Aerial TestMac:  Aerial TestMAC functions as the L2/L1 interface, which schedules packets according to a predefined launch pattern.
• Aerial RU Emulator:  Aerial RU emulator is a basic implementation of ORAN FH interface. Its functions include verifying the timing of FH packets, checking the integrity of DL IQ samples and scheduling the transmission of UL IQ samples.

Getting Started with NVIDIA Aerial™ CUDA-Accelerated RAN

Please visit the NVIDIA 6G Developer Program on how to get started quickly with the NVIDIA AI Aerial platform.

License

GOVERNING TERMS: The software and materials are governed by the NVIDIA Software License Agreement (found at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/agreements/enterprise-software/nvidia-software-license-agreement/) and the Product-Specific Terms for NVIDIA AI Products (found at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/agreements/enterprise-software/product-specific-terms-for-ai-products/).

Documentation

Please see the release notes, installation guide and quickstart guide at NVIDIA Docs Hub:

Technical Support

Use the NVIDIA Aerial Forum for questions regarding this software. You must have a developer account and be signed in to access the forum.