According to Intel, together with Ericsson and HPE it has successfully demonstrated Ericsson's Cloud RAN (radio access network) solution based on the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor with Intel vRAN Boost. Ericsson says that its Cloud RAN is the industry's first virtualized RAN solution to be successfully demonstrated and ready to deploy.
The collaboration between Ericsson, Intel, and HPE is ongoing at development labs globally, including Ericsson's Open Lab in Ottawa, where the demonstration took place, and at the joint Ericsson – Intel Tech Hub in Santa Clara, California.
Intel indicates that the demonstration marks the first step toward Ericsson's plans for a commercialized Cloud RAN solution based on Intel's latest generation platform on HPE ProLiant DL110 servers. It will help communications service providers increase network capacity and energy efficiency while gaining greater flexibility and scalability.
"Achieving this significant milestone with Ericsson and HPE is possible only through open industry collaboration. Strong ecosystem engagements like this are absolutely critical to drive global innovation and commercial deployments at scale," said Dan Rodriguez, corporate vice president and general manager of the Network and Edge Solutions Group at Intel. "Virtualization of the RAN is the next major transformation as we work to advance mobile networks into the future."
Radio access networks (RAN) come with a unique set of requirements, especially the extreme demand on processing in the compute platform of Cloud RAN. To address these processing needs, acceleration technology is required. According to Intel, the 4th Gen Xeon processor with Intel vRAN Boost provides a highly integrated solution for that meets such requirements. These processors include built-in acceleration features that optimize workload performance for packet and signal processing, load balancing, AI and machine learning, and the implementation of dynamic power management.
According to Intel, it has been working on network virtualization for more than a decade and is a leader in network silicon with nearly all vRAN (virtual radio access network) deployments running on Intel architecture.
