Virtual Radio Access Network Opportunities and Challenges

With the Radio Access Network (RAN) market moving away from the use of special-purpose hardware and towards a cloud implementation, there are many challenges and opportunities apparent in this shift. Use of commodity processing hardware offers benefits but also challenges given the real-time nature of radio access networks. Centralized processing offers operational savings in system management and maintenance as well as savings due to processing pooling and power optimization. At the same time the costs of a "fronthaul" network to service a central RAN location are considerable. This paper describes aspects of centralization savings and a way to avoid high fronthaul costs by splitting cell versus user processing, allowing a hybrid central and partially-central processing environment to optimize a RAN for specific deployments, including mixed macro/metro deployments. In addition, consideration of 5G is introduced and a migration path of a virtualized RAN system to 5G is presented.