On this month’s edition of Networks Tech Talk, Samsung’s Shamik Shah, Sr. Director of RAN Systems Engineering, walks through the evolution of Radio Access Networks or vRAN including a deep dive of the benefits and challenges , its architecture, and how Samsung’s vRAN solution can provide MNOs with a host of benefits for deploying next-generation networks.
Virtualized RAN solutions provide a combination of IT advantages with high telco-grade quality to meet operator’s needs. Historically, radio access networks (RAN) relied on vendor specific hardware with fixed capacity to meet operator network stability and KPI requirements with minimal flexibility. With a growing demand in bandwidth from users and the evolution of 5G, network requirements will need to scale efficiently to meet dynamic traffic patterns as well as provide lower latency and higher bandwidth for emerging technology and applications. vRAN provides a hardware-agnostic, fully virtualized solution to quickly allocate resources and update network features, along with the quality and resiliency of a wireless network to meet the needs of ever-increasing network demands as well as support new 5G use cases.
With every new technology, there comes a mixture of benefits and challenges as the industry continues to evolve and adapt to new market demands. Key benefits of vRAN include the ability to efficiently scale and pool network resources, application virtualization for optimized service performance, and the ability to create flexible and cost-efficient RAN. Some of the challenges that Shah discusses includes new software competency requirements for engineers, a need for increased fiber density, as well as network architecture changes to provide greater network flexibility.
In this webinar, Shah breaks down some of the ways in which operators can navigate these challenges in order to take full advantage of vRAN benefits. By implementing vRAN architecture, operators will be able to take advantage of the CAPEX and OPEX savings that comes with a more flexible architecture when deploying these networks.