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Is Open RAN Key to the 5G Future?

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Is Open RAN Key to the 5G Future? Is Open RAN key to the 5G future? By Sean Kinney JUNE 2016 SEPTEMBER 2020 Report Sponsors: FEATURE REPORT Introduction telecom giant being pinned down between now and 2025. For Open The true benefits of 5G will be by a lack of access to components RAN radios, the firm projects ship- realized with massive scale – some- and markets. In this report, we will ments will pass 1 million in the next thing that operators will have to explore the latest developments in five years. pay mightily to achieve. In car- the Open RAN world, including per- Dell’Oro Group VP and analyst rier-led efforts to shift network spectives from vendors, operators, Stefan Pongratz conceded the pro- economics in their favor, the Open politicians and other ecosystem jections may seem “overly optimis- RAN (radio access network) eco- stakeholders in an effort to under- tic” given that Open RAN technol- system has flourished in recent stand whether Open RAN is key to ogy is “relatively untested,” but, years and is potentially poised for a the 5G future. “At the same time, the momentum big breakthrough. A key distinction here is the is improving, and we have adjust- Major global communication ser- overlap, and difference, between ed the outlook upward to reflect vice providers like Telefónica and virtualized RAN and Open RAN a confluence of factors, includ- Vodafone are exploring multi-ven- – virtualized RAN decouples hard- ing promising results from initial dor RAN solutions for their network ware and software allowing net- commercial deployments, growing footprints. In Japan, relatively new work functions typically run on support from the incumbent RAN market entrant Rakuten Mobile has a proprietary technology stack to suppliers, and increased geopolit- used an open architecture to build exist as software workloads using ical uncertainty acting as a cata- its fully-virtualized network and is commodity or custom hardware lyst for operators to rethink their evangelizing its open, cloud-native whereas Open RAN considers the supplier strategies.” approach as bringing a huge reduc- same but adds in modularity where- Mobile Experts Chief Analyst Joe tion in capital and operating costs. in hardware and software from Madden also sees a bright future DISH is following a similar path in multiple vendors can interoperate. for Open RAN but drew an import- the U.S. but has yet to turn its own To contextualize Open RAN mo- ant distinction between sub-6 GHz internal efforts into a reference de- mentum, Dell’Oro Group recently gear as a coverage play as opposed sign á la the Rakuten Communica- published a five-year forecast re- to millimeter wave-based systems tions Platform. port that projects vRAN revenues, geared towards multi-gigabit-per- Further, geopolitical issues have “defined as the proportion of RAN second throughput. Madden wrote prompted an examination of ven- baseband/compute capex that that, “Almost every company in dor diversification and how to will utilize general-purpose pro- the [RAN] market is looking into foster innovation through govern- cessors for centralized radio units O-RAN, which will be the choice ment investment; this is primarily and/or distributed radio units. solution for coverage problems. a function of U.S. sanctions against Dell’Oro forecasts that capex will O-RAN hardware and software can China’s Huawei resulting in the hit between $3 billion and $5 billion be cheaper while achieving similar 2 FEATURE REPORT coverage as traditional architec- Functional split a virtualized baseband unit, which tures. Considering a five-year time- The notion of functional splits can be further subdivided into a frame, Madden sees “rapid adoption in the RAN first came up in 3GPP central unit and a distributed unit. of O-RAN” coming, but focused on Release 14 and was further defined That idea of subdividing function- fronthaul and F1 radio interfaces. in Release 15. The high-level idea is ality, in terms of either physical lo- Regarding higher-frequency sys- that the primary 5G use cases — en- cation, type of workload or both, is tems, “We have...identified some hanced mobile broadband (eMBB), core to Open RAN and, more broad- major performance issues with ultra reliable low latency commu- ly, 5G. And if different vendors pro- O-RAN networks.” nications (URLLC), and massive in- vide different pieces, there has to ternet of things — require a highly be an interoperability framework. The vocabulary flexible RAN architecture marked Like most things telecom, Open by a, well, split of control and user Central unit RAN brings with it a complex al- plane baseband unit functions to The central unit, or CU, supports phabet soup of acronyms and ini- enable a more feature rich, respon- non-real time Layer 2 and Layer 3 tialisms. Here we’re providing brief sive network that can adapt to sup- workloads like RRC and PDCP. In explanations of some key terminol- port a wide variety of use cases and the context of Open RAN, this is ogy. And, to be sure, this is a super- deployment configurations. software hosted on a server that ficial description of the following The specific components, delin- can be located in an edge datacen- terms and a fraction of the full set eated below, require open interfac- ter, cell site, central office, regional of relevant jargon. es between remote radios units and datacenter, or even co-located with Image courtesy of Altran 3 FEATURE REPORT the distributed unit. A CU can sup- elements can collapse together and the trial met its goals of improving port multiple distributed units con- create a single physical entity with spectral efficiency. Measurement nected via midhaul. different virtual functionalities.” and optimization xApps were used to collect live network data. In this Distributed unit RAN Intelligent Controller case the partners used Measure- The distributed unit, DU, handles The RAN Intelligent Controller ment Campaign, Automated Neigh- real-time L1 and L2 scheduling, (RIC) is a software platform re- bor Relation and Admission Control. baseband and RF processing, RLC, sponsible for radio orchestration Describing the trial, Tavares said, MAC and some PHY functions. Sche- and management; it supports ap- “It was focused on one specific part matically the DU sites between the plications like mobility and in- of the city so not many sites. One CU and the remote radio unit but, terference management, network thing that is important to learn in both theory and practice, the DU policies, admission control and so from the architecture is that one server can be co-located with the forth. In a vRAN, the RIC collects, RIC instance can support several CU, at a cell site, at an edge cloud analyzes and acts upon network base station sites. The way the ar- site or in a central office. data to optimize user experience chitecture is evolving, and especial- using artificial intelligence and ly on 5G networks, you can have Remote radio unit machine learning algorithms. The the RIC co-localized with the cen- The remote radio unit (RRU) in- RIC comes in two flavors, near-real tralized until that basically han- cludes the digital front end, some time and non-real time; the former dles that part of the baseband pro- PHY layer functions, digital beam- runs xApps that pool data from all cessing. Then, from that, you can forming and other features associ- forms of radio infrastructure to actually manage up to hundreds of ated with legacy cellular radios. continuously optimize user experi- distributed units that are going to RRUs come in a variety of form ence and network efficiency based be deployed in a city.” factors informed by manufactur- on fluctuating demand and re- While the focus in this trial was on er and site-specific deployment source availability while the latter RAN optimization, Tavares said this considerations. takes on things like configuration, premise could be extended and open Parallel Wireless VP of Marketing device, fault, performance and life- up “new possibilities of third-party Eugina Jordan tied it all togeth- cycle management. applications on top of the network. er: “The future evolution of RAN In June Nokia and AT&T conduct- Basically any service that would will be toward dynamic function- ed a RIC trial on the carrier’s mil- benefit from having access to low al splits...The functionality of the limeter wave 5G network in New latency could benefit from having a RAN will be distributed between York City. Nokia’s Sandro Tavares, more direct connection to the RAN. DUs and CUs as it is defined in global head of mobile networks For example, in just an anecdotal 5G...In different scenarios, these marketing, told RCR Wireless News way, if you’re looking to a video 4 OCTOBER 13TH DIGITAL The definitive event shaping the future of Open RAN • Policy Support Should U.S. Lawmakers allocate federal funding for Open RAN R&D? • Supply Chain Diversification Open RAN conversations are steeped in geopolitics, but WHAT'S ON does vendor diversification make supply chains more secure and resilient? • Ready for “primetime”? Was Attorney General Barr correct when he said Open RAN isn’t ready for primetime? REGISTER NOW! Exclusive 25% off for our readers with code 'RCR25' WHAT'S INCLUDED? Access to all contents Q&As with speakers, live polling, chat with attendees Sponsor demos and hangouts Happy hour with professional mixology lesson Intimate, topic-driven group networking sessions (VIP only) Free ‘goodie bag’ with cocktail kit, exclusive coupons and freebies (VIP only) Access to all sessions on-demand for 6 months post- conference (VIP only) FEATURE REPORT Image courtesy of O-RAN Alliance. Image courtesy of O-RAN Alliance. streaming service or a video com- standpoint. By promoting policies Telefónica, US Ignite, Verizon, VM- munication service, you can have an that standardize and develop open Ware, Vodafone, World Wide Tech- xApp that can optimize the delivery interfaces, we can ensure interoper- nology, and XCOM-Labs.
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