Delivery FIGURE 10-8 System lifecycle performance tracking. 344 Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Systems Architecture and Design Performance exploration. Performance exploration is a static "paper analysis" phase that does not require final hardware or software to be available. During this phase, theoretical calculations on various system aspects as discussed chapter 3 are collected in a spreadsheet or a similar tool as we showed in Chapter 9, Software Performance. The spreadsheet allows us to plug in different use cases and predict various throughputs and other aspects. We can explore system corner cases (user counts, antenna counts, fronthaul latencies, and so on) and provide feedback to the requirements owner on "where the system breaks." This model can include power consumption exploration if chip vendors include low-level tools for thermals, which can feed into a board-level analysis. The static performance analysis delivers derivative requirements on hardware and BSP such as DMA (Direct Memory Access) engines, double data rate throughput, Ethernet bandwidth, and other components that can be individually benchmarked, independent of the rest of the system. This sets the targets for "Proof Points" that are developed as part of the BSP to prove that these system components achieve target performance and to characterize (and minimize) the system loading imposed by these components. The performance calculators also provide targets for the application stacks (L1, L2 stacks), translating system-level performance requirements such as carriers, layer, and antennas to lower level requirements on MAC/RLC, PDCP, and Physical Layer specifications. These requirements are fed into the internal or third-party software teams together with functional/ feature requirements to define a Statement of Work or (virtual) contract on deliverables. Often, it is unclear what the CPU/Digital Signal Processing/accelerator performance should be before the software delivery is finished-after which there is no time left to potentially chan