Rakuten Mobile has done some good work in building an open vRAN network. After some initial struggle and heroic engineering efforts, it’s on air and it works. I would like to pay tribute to CTO Tareq Amin and his team for proving that vRAN works.
However, the problem Rakuten tackled was one-dimensional. It is to achieve green field network coverage. You don’t need a lot of capacity, at least initially, as it takes time to increase the capacity of your network. Rakuten plans to succeed in the future and clearly recognizes the need for further improvement. Amin recently said, “The part that the industry desperately needs to deal with and fix is the radio access DU … I don’t think the current open RAN platform DU is absolutely optimal. It lacks a lot to make. It’s competitive. “
He’s trying to say that the virtual distributed units (vDUs) available on the market can’t handle some of the high-capacity features of 4G / 5G, such as carrier aggregation, CoMP, and interference conditioning in most cases. is. These features are useful for LTE networks deployed in single-vendor networks where unique interfaces allow coordination between wireless and multiple DUs.
The industry adds these features. The O-RAN Alliance and other organizations can expect to standardize interfaces that enable more advanced features in an open environment. Companies like Intel are making great efforts to implement advanced vDU functionality on standard server hardware. Rakuten should be able to upgrade its software to increase capacity as it adds more customers in the next few years … It’s like Tesla’s customers improving their car’s performance with software upgrades.
Relation: It’s not for vRAN now or never — Industry Voice: Madden
That’s not the only discussion. The Greenfield Network (Rakuten and DISH) is a small part of the entire market. The real challenge is to virtualize a 5G network that tunes existing radios with new and old spectra. Older radios may be currently running LTE or have already been software upgraded to 5G NR. Often, dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) is used to perform both formats. They use carrier aggregation (CA), CoMP, eICIC, and other features to squeeze capacity out of these congested legacy networks.
The challenge is to virtualize without sacrificing legacy performance that has already been optimized. Operators cannot give up CA and DSS to take advantage of virtualization flexibility and scalability. As a result, some operators use vCU only for 5G deployments, not full vRAN with both vCU and vDU.
As with the O-RAN network, you can implement vDU in your own legacy network and at the same time achieve high capacity performance. Verizon is currently deploying a vCU on Samsung, and Ericsson has launched a vDU with the ability to coordinate between the new spectrum and 7 million existing radios in the field.
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Read More: There are vRAN challenges to overcome — Industry Voice: Madden