5G services present a significant growth opportunity for CSPs, but traditional RAN infrastructure makes it difficult to fully realize the 5G promise. Virtualizing RAN functions can mitigate some challenges. Open RAN can further mitigate those challenges.
The advantages of vRAN are many. Flexibility goes up, with the CSP now able to scale their RAN faster. It delivers operational efficiencies, allowing the CSP to adapt to shifts in network demand. The RAN becomes more agile. The CSP can host different types of vRAN functions on the same infrastructure, regardless of location. It can apply consistent operational practices across distributed RAN sites. The CSP can quickly deploy their RAN sites because vRAN is a software-based architecture with tightly coupled automation capabilities.
Eventually, many CSPs want to go further, implementing architectures based on the O-RAN Alliance. The O-RAN Alliance offers an evolving set of industry standards for RAN interfaces that support interoperation among equipment from multiple vendors. The standards aim to further reduce existing constraints through centralized automation that simplifies RAN operations. The standards and the technologies derived from them, in addition, allows CSPs to move RAN intelligence to a dedicated controller. As a result, the CSP can pool and adjust RAN resources to accommodate traffic and service delivery in an optimal way. Therefore, many CSPs intend to adopt the standards and technologies when they are available. It’s a journey. Today’s vRAN is part of a broader, long-term transformation of the RAN.
VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN Paves a Path to RAN Transformation
VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN provides a way for CSPs to evolve from traditional RAN to vRAN. From there, the platform, supported by both hypervisor and bare metal, establishes the foundation for the migration toward the open RAN. However, turning the idea of vRAN into reality means thinking through the characteristics a CSP expects from a next-generation RAN platform. While expectations vary by CSP, VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN contains powerful capabilities to help you transform your RAN.
A Horizontal Platform
VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN enables you to virtualize multi‑vendor RAN functions on a horizontal platform, allowing you to deploy vRAN functions at sites that are best suited to perform their functional purposes. As a horizontal RAN platform, it has gone through strenuous testing and integration work with key RAN partners. In addition, by running vRAN functions alongside telco workloads, such as virtualized cell site routers or RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) as an example, you can reduce your hardware footprint, leading to a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO), including energy savings.
Performance Optimized RAN Platform
The abstraction layer provided by VMware’s hypervisor technology separates the hardware from vRAN functions. The key role VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN plays is to expose hardware capabilities such as layer 1 RAN acceleration technologies, including inline and lookaside, to the vRAN functions sitting atop the hypervisor layer. For example, the platform enables the ability to manage multiple accelerator cards in one server and effectively load balance and distribute traffic among them. VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN allows RAN vendors to tap into RAN‑centric hardware capabilities though its hypervisor layer.
Cloud-Smart Automation
The RAN is widely distributed and complex. It defies manual management processes and makes deep automation capabilities vital. Powered by cloud-smart automation, VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN accelerates and automates the provisioning and onboarding of vRAN functions across thousands of distributed RAN sites. It does this by understanding the requirements, such as latency and bandwidth, of each vRAN function being installed. By simplifying Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations, the platform reduces OpEx and improves your operational efficiency. Establishing consistency across distributed RAN sites further drives efficiency gains.
Workflow Hub
The automation capability of VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN includes Workflow Hub, enabling you to easily define repeatable workflows that are less error prone and require less manual intervention. The objective of Workflow Hub is for you to save time and reduce OpEx. By using pre-built templates as building blocks in a simple drag-and-drop GUI, Workflow Hub lets you quickly stitch together processes that address various use cases.
Service Assurance
VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN empowers you to simplify the operations of your RAN and services, ensuring high availability while providing performance, closed-loop automation, and issue remediation. With the service assurance capabilities, the platform can monitor and collect data from an entire network of RAN sites, including physical, virtual, and containerized network functions as well as cloud infrastructure. This information coupled with automated Day 1 and Day 2 operations like healing and scaling enables closed-loop remediation.
Service Management and Orchestration
As an industry leader in virtualization and cloud-native technologies, VMware is a clear choice for you seeking a Service Management and Orchestration solution to oversee its distributed multi-vendor RAN. VMware Service Management and Orchestration and VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN together allow you to plan, deploy, and orchestrate your RAN with end-to-end automation, service assurance, and optimization. At its core lies a commitment to extensibility and facilitating compatibility with any vendor and application.
RAN-focused Ecosystem
VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN goes through strenuous testing and integration work with key RAN partners to maximize performance and improve resource utilization. The ecosystem stems from the industry-leading RAN vendors, including both network equipment providers and underpinning infrastructure providers. VMware and its RAN partners together test, tune, manage, and scale vRAN functions and server hosts so that the performance of the RAN solutions is validated and optimized to be telco-grade.
Conclusion
You are on the cusp of growth, with 5G and a host of new services driving big gains in your consumer and commercial businesses. Existing RAN infrastructure stands in your way. It’s too inflexible, costly, and slow to adapt. vRAN, and ultimately open RAN, represent the future. However, the choice of vRAN platform is critical to success with 5G. A highly automated horizontal vRAN platform provides a basis for deploying 5G and beyond.
VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN meets these criteria, offering you a way to move toward the vRAN and open RAN in the future. It provides deep automation, orchestration, and service assurance on top of RAN-optimized horizontal infrastructure. These capabilities make it the optimal choice for RAN modernization and the journey to profitable RAN monetization with 5G.
