Vodafone is a pioneer in Open RAN technologies and believes that Open RAN will lead to a more cost-effective, secure, energy efficient and customer-focused network of the future. With years of experience from multiple Open RAN tests, trials and now commercial deployments on current XR11 platforms under their belt, Vodafone has been looking at the next generation of hardware platforms that are being launched, wanting to understand how these servers will improve Open RAN performance based on real-world data.
Vodafone and Dell Technologies have been collaborating in our Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL) to understand the load performance of Open RAN on Dell Technologies PowerEdge servers. Recently, Vodafone has been working in OTEL with the Dell Technologies engineers, conducting several iterations of qualification cycles for the next generation PowerEdge.Next servers and comparing the results with its predecessors based on real world 5G RAN systems use cases. This data has been invaluable to Vodafone, enabling them to accelerate their deployment schedule of Open RAN on the latest PowerEdge.Next servers.
We defined the engagement in OTEL between Vodafone and Dell across three phases of testing. The first phase, identified as Phase 0, focused on Layer-1 validation in a simulated environment. The next phase, Phase 1, focused on performance validation when part of a 5G end-end RAN system with real workloads driven by real world traffic models identified by Vodafone. Phase 2 focused on increasing the scale of workload testing with Vodafone traffic models. Future phases are being planned to advance deeper understanding of RAN workloads and deployment scenarios.