Thanks to open standard consortiums such as the ORANAlliance, an open ecosystem of disaggregated and interchangeable components is now available. Network equipment providers are now able to commoditize hardware and software in a market, historically dominated by closed and proprietary systems. The standards are now in place to change select components based on technical feasibility and/or financial benefit.
Traditional RAN architecture consists of the following:
- A radio base station (that is, the visible tower structure)
- A baseband unit (BBU), is typically housed in a small building.
With the advent of 4G and network virtualization, vRAN solutions began to appear. These vRAN solutions disaggregated the BBU functionality—the distributed unit (DU), centralized unit (CU), and radio unit (RU)—into virtualized, software-based modules. These modules could be deployed on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware rather than a traditional bundled appliance.
While disaggregation and virtualization made BBU less expensive to deploy and easier to scale, the performance of COTS hardware (which featured a general-purpose design) failed to match the performance of purpose-built BBU appliances.
This figure shows how the convergence between the telecom industry and the IT industry where everything is just software, Here Dell Technologies provides different and powerful servers (HW) with high capabilities for different environments and use cases. This helps OpenRAN vendors to use their SW easily and effectively to serve the customers.
