Within the telco industry, radio access networks (RAN) can represent up to 80% of the total cost of building a 5G mobile network. As telcos and consumers alike struggle to find best ways to deal with today’s inflation, this type of capital expenditure could potentially signal “game-over” for providers who had planned to evolve to 5G. But there is good news to report. With vRAN technology, telcos can eliminate this barrier to entry and pivot away from custom-built legacy RAN hardware by deploying software-based solutions that run on industry standard servers.
The RAN provides critical technology that connects users to the mobile network over radio waves. It also provides access to key applications on the web. Classic RAN technologies integrate hardware and software into purpose-built platforms, whereas virtualized RAN (vRAN) solutions disaggregate the hardware and software to provide operators with better management of supply chain functions, solution flexibility, and improved ability to become more competitive.
Open RAN is the telco industry’s general term for a completely open radio access network architecture. Open RAN offers interoperable interfaces, RAN virtualization, and support for advanced AI-enabled capabilities. The emergence of Open RAN technology has provided mobile operators an opportunity to break free from vendor lock-in, reduce total cost of ownership, accelerate time to market, and rapidly introduce new innovations for their customers. Open RAN solutions on general-purpose compute can sometimes be implemented without the use of hardware accelerators when the compute processing requirements are low. However, Open RAN use cases with high compute-intensive operations – implemented without hardware accelerators – will need many more CPU cores, resulting in a larger footprint with higher power consumption.
Open RAN is praised for stimulating innovation within the RAN vendor ecosystem while also providing seamless coexistence with traditional RAN technologies.
vRAN refers specifically to virtualization of RAN baseband functions and migration from custom-built hardware platforms to industry standard servers. With vRAN, 5G becomes software-defined to facilitate architectural flexibility, platform harmonization, and simplified operations. VRAN provides a tremendous opportunity for mobile network operators to eliminate or reduce vendor lock-in, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), accelerate time to market, and rapidly introduce new service innovations.
O-RAN refers to a standardized approach recognized and promoted by the O-RAN Alliance. The O-RAN Alliance’s stated goal is to achieve an open, intelligent, virtualized, and fully interoperable RAN.
An elegant solution for cost and management challenges
As Communication Service Providers (CSPs) move to 5G and adopt the new RAN architectures to maximize agility and flexibility while reducing costs, it is of paramount importance to ensure that network performance levels – expected by consumers and demanded by CSPs – are maintained .
To address these 5G RAN performance requirements, the HPE ProLiant DL110 Plus Telco server was specifically designed, optimized, and introduced for vRAN applications, offering mobile network operators a powerful, yet cost effective, highly scalable, secure, and flexible packaged solution for edge-deployed vRAN. The HPE ProLiant DL110 compute platform is built on the latest 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, optimized for the needs of production vRAN workloads.
These optimizations meet the following mobile network operator needs:
- Open, standards-based architecture that supports vRAN software from multiple vendors
- Reduced overall power consumption and footprint
- Highly dense platform supporting the functionality of baseband unit, fronthaul gateway, and cell site router in a highly optimized single short-depth 1U/1P server
- Accelerator options to drive performance-sensitive, packet-processing vRAN workloads
- Consistency from core to edge that delivers a trusted HPE ProLiant security and manageability experience, including the security features of the Silicon Root of Trust.
The server features open-standards architecture and a carrier-grade ruggedized Network Equipment-Building (NEBS) Level 3-compliant platform. The rack-mounted server is a compact 1U high, minimizing physical infrastructure demands in the remote environment.
High performance requirements addressed in challenging use cases
Together with our technology partners, we have summarized the extensive server optimization efforts and published results in two technical reports. Indeed, a number of vRAN software vendors are already using Intel ACC100 on HPE infrastructure to meet high-performance requirements for challenging Open vRAN use cases.
These white papers demonstrate the readiness of the HPE telco server infrastructure solution and Intel ACC100 accelerator card for virtualized RAN applications. Test results shared clearly show the readiness of the Intel ACC100 accelerator card for virtualized DU applications running on HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen10 PlusTelco Server with Wind River Studio, where FEC is offloaded to the accelerator card.
Virtualization of telco networking functions on general compute platforms is a well proven architectural trend enabling maximum flexibility, sustainable technological evolution, and superior TCO. By migrating telco infrastructure to distributed cloud platforms, the telco industry is leveraging the economies of scale that have already been seen in public cloud. Recently, cellular RAN began to open up for virtualization, enabled by Open RAN and the ever-growing efficiency of general compute platforms.
HPE and Intel have collaborated to transform the economics of RAN by introducing workload-optimized general compute platforms that meet the performance and efficiencies required by modern, 5G RAN.
HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen10 Plus server readiness for open RAN use case technical white paper
This white paper summarizes the results of validation tests performed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the Intel® vRAN Accelerator ACC100 Adapter in the HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen10 Plus—Telco server.
Recent advancements in general-purpose compute as well as telco-driven industry initiatives for open, standard interfaces within the RAN domain have led to open virtualized RAN (vRAN). It is based on the following technology principles:
- Fully decoupled software running on abstracted general-purpose hardware, with a best-of-breed approach
- Functional components implemented as abstracted software interacting via open standardized interfaces
- General-purpose edge compute infrastructure supporting multiple use cases and workloads, with vRAN workload as one of the tenants
- Cloud-native capabilities in deployment, lifecycle management, scaling, and redundancy of vRAN workloads and underlying infrastructure.
To learn more about HPE vRAN solutions for CSPs and how they can help you take the next steps in your 5G network transformation journey, please visit our website.
As a marketing leader for HPE’s Telco industry product portfolio, Jim focuses on driving go-to-market strategy for 5G cloud platforms, multi-access edge computing, and open virtualized RAN (vRAN) solutions. Connect with Jim on LinkedIn.
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