Performance Characterization of dApps in Open Radio Access Networks

2026-05-06

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of systematic understanding of resource utilization and performance characteristics of distributed applications (dApps) in O-RAN across diverse deployment environments, which hinders efficient deployment decisions. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of representative dApps, quantifying trade-offs in latency, scalability, and resource efficiency between bare-metal and containerized deployments. Furthermore, we investigate real-time performance optimization through hardware acceleration using Smart NICs. Through extensive benchmarking and fine-grained resource monitoring, we characterize the performance gaps between the two deployment paradigms, identify critical bottlenecks, and propose a Smart NIC-based task offloading scheme that significantly enhances both real-time responsiveness and resource efficiency of dApps.

Abstract

Despite recommendations to deploy real-time Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) applications (dApps) in containerized environments, existing approaches predominantly rely on bare-metal servers. Moreover, current dApp deployments offer limited visibility into the resource usage patterns of both intelligent and non-intelligent dApps, hindering informed deployment decisions. This work addresses these gaps by implementing and evaluating representative dApps across multiple deployment scenarios (bare-metal and containers) to characterize the trade-offs in latency, scalability, and resource utilization. Additionally, we identify key performance bottlenecks and demonstrate how offloading dApps to emerging hardware accelerators, such as smart Network Interface Cards (NICs), can alleviate these limitations and improve real-time responsiveness in O-RAN systems.

Problem

• dApps
• Open Radio Access Networks
• resource utilization
• real-time performance
• deployment visibility

Innovation

• O-RAN
• dApps
• containerization
• hardware acceleration
• Smart NICs