Blog

Exploring vRAN Architecture and its Values

Oct 15. 2020

  • Young Lee

    Head of Network Architecture Office
    Networks Business at Samsung Electronics

Virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) is the next step in networks technology that will bring increased agility, flexibility and cost efficiency to the operators. Earlier this year, Samsung announced the commercialization of its new carrier-grade, fully-virtualized 5G Radio Access Network solution (Link), that consists of a virtualized Central Unit (vCU), a virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU), and a wide range of radios.

 

By replacing the dedicated baseband hardware used in the traditional RAN architecture with software elements on a general-purpose computing platform, vRAN offers a smooth migration to 5G along with many other benefits.

What are some of its key benefits?

  • Flexible and adaptive capacity management via resource pooling and workload placement

 

  • Lower total cost of ownership with unified hardware and software infrastructure

 

  • Simplified network operation and maintenance through unified management

 

  • Foundation for automated network slicing through dynamic resource scaling and function instantiation

 

  • Operation and service innovation through unified infrastructure and management

Left to Right: Jai-Jin Lim (Principal Engineer), Young Lee (Head of Network Architecture Office), Hyunjeong Lee (Principal Engineer)

vRAN is certainly an attractive technology option for the operators from both the qualitative and quantitative perspectives, especially in the long run. Based on our cost modeling, vRAN based on Centralized RAN deployment is more economical than D-RAN with an overall TCO reduction of 13% and OPEX reduction of 25% in the duration of 5 years.

Samsung Networks newly released a white paper that takes a deeper dive into the vRAN architecture and its values, quantifying the advantages of vRAN over the legacy technologies.

 

To learn more, read our white paper on vRAN and cost modeling.

 

While global operators continue to expand their 5G networks, Samsung can help in deploying and scaling their networks with our latest vRAN solutions, ultimately delivering high-quality mobile experience to the users.

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