As the telecommunications industry is undergoing a big shift towards open RAN, communications service providers (CSPs) are considering how to best realize the true potential of their new network deployments. From the conceptual design of their RAN all the way to the day-to-day operations, our CSP customers are looking for ways that provide them with a unique advantage in the dynamic market to quickly monetize their investments. This is not an easy feat, but fortunately VMware’s mission is to equip them with the necessary cloud agility and network programmability required to do just that.
Central to our mission are the RAN Intelligent Controllers (RIC). The RICs are the key to unlock this openness and monetization of the RAN as they provide the necessary abstraction to move business and operational intelligence away from the underlying data plane and into the control of our CSP customers and their applications partners.
If we’ve learned anything from the Core network transformation, it’s that network programmability works.
- Need improved efficiencies and reduce costs?
- Ready for greater agility?
- Want to monetize your RAN from day 1?
Yup, you can have all of that and the performance you need to support the open RAN thanks to the VMware RIC.
Our RIC modernizes the RAN to be programmable, modular, and built with best-of-breed solutions from a rich and vibrant ecosystem of partners, regardless of the functions they offer, while providing the RAN intelligence to assure all the solutions work harmoniously.
The design of VMware Distributed RIC (functions as a near-real-time RIC) and VMware Centralized RIC (functions as a non-real-time RIC) removes RAN integration complexities, offering our xApp and rApps ecosystem partners the platform that is vendor neutral, multi-cloud and with focus on applications’ enablement.
Furthermore, our RIC has been built with our app ecosystem partners’ experience at the heart of its design, offering SDKs with a set of resources, tools, and services that will help accelerate their xApp and rApp development, enhance portability, and increase security on our RIC platforms.
Our RIC SDKs, both for VMware Distributed RIC and VMware Centralized RIC, are a logical extension of our RIC and it is composed of a set of libraries and data structures definitions designed to abstract the user applications from the complexities of networking and communicating with our RICs, the E2 nodes and with other applications. The following demo illustrates how our Distributed RIC’s SDK, as an example, helps our app ecosystem partners jumpstart their applications development and bring their new ideas to the market faster.
A perfect example of the successful pairing between creative ingenuity in an xApp and the enablement provided by our RIC and its SDK, the following whitepaper shows how Cohere’s spectrum multiplier xApp unlocks the true capacity of the open RAN cellsite by utilizing MU-MIMO and massive MIMO for both frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) networks in any band, under any mobility conditions, with any radio and any handset, while operating in the cloud.
Read our solution brief – Boosting 5G Capacity with VMware RIC and Cohere: Enabling Cohere’s MU-MIMO Scheduler with a RIC and learn more about the VMware RIC on our website.
