The industry generally agrees that today’s traditional RAN systems need to evolve. With the exponential increase in wireless traffic and edge computing application expected with 5G, building out scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient radio networks will be critical to the future success of communication service providers (CSPs). Unfortunately, today’s traditional RAN systems tend to be architecturally inflexible and create vendor lock-in.
This realization has led to the development of virtualized RAN (vRAN) systems and, beyond that, open RAN systems that allow CSPs to mix and match vRAN software and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers for a more flexible and standards-based best-of-breed approach. Intuitively, Open RAN makes a lot of sense. Yet Open RAN solutions have so far struggled to match the cost and performance of traditional RAN solutions.
To succeed fully, Open RAN must achieve cost/performance parity with traditional RAN systems. One of the main challenges to achieving this has been the virtualized distributed unit (vDU) performance when running on a COTS server. The vDUs, which are responsible for upper layer 1 and layer 2 functions, so far do not perform at the same level as traditional RAN systems, where these are done in a highly optimized proprietary broadband base unit (BBU). In fact, in early Open RAN projects, we found that especially the Layer 1 performance is critical for the vDU to achieve the efficiency levels of traditional RAN BBUs.
Today, Dell is proud to announce the industry’s first layer 1 inline RAN accelerator card for vRAN and Open RAN solutions, developed in collaboration with Marvell Technology. The Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card is essential in addressing the vDU performance gap in Open RAN deployments, lowering costs while achieving vDU performance parity in Open RAN systems. The Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card will connect to a standard PCI Express (PCIe) slot, enabling it to run on Dell PowerEdge or any other x86-based server.
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