Industry group puts an accelerator on cloud-RAN
Lenovo, China Mobile, Xilinx, Radisys and Napatech jointly demonstrated a cloud-RAN solution that supports heterogeneous acceleration hardware and decouples software from hardware at Mobile World Congress Shanghai.
A cloud-based Radio Access Network is a virtualized RAN that can coordinate multiple radio sites from a data center using NFV and SDN techniques. C-RAN is a mobile network architecture that is expected to be a cornerstone of 5G.
[Read more: What is the difference between C-RAN and fronthaul?]
“RAN cloudification and virtualization are important technology directions in the 5G era and will have far-reaching significance on optimizing operators’ network efficiency, enabling business innovation, and enhancing user experience,” said Dr. Ying Huang, VP of Lenovo and head of Enterprise & Cloud Research and 5G Research Labs at Lenovo Research in a press statement.
Global operators, including China Mobile and AT&T, have been working to build upon the C-RAN concept, since they launched the Open RAN Alliance (a combination of the xRAN Forum and the C-RAN Alliance groups) in February. The ORAN Alliance gained seven new members today, with carriers Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, KT, Singtel, SK Telecom, Telefonica and Telstra joining the initiative.
[Read more: C-RAN: Cloud RAN vs. centralized RAN]
The demo used Lenovo ThinkCloud NFVI carrier-grade cloud platform software, x86 servers and switches. The acceleration happened on Napatech’s SmartNICs, which are based on Xilinx FPGAs, and third-party adapters based on ASIC design. The ThinkCloud NFVI abstracted the acceleration hardware and served as the unified API to VNF applications.
“To meet the agility, scalability and flexibility requirements of the C-RAN in a rapidly evolving 5G environment, the standard open API acceleration has been demonstrated using Xilinx’s Adaptable platform on Napatech SmartNIC. … The AAL API based C-RAN accelerator platform deployed with Radisys PDCP Stack on Lenovo server and cloud software platforms demonstrates the advantages such as flexibility, guaranteed latency and performance gains of FPGA based acceleration in telco cloud,” noted Farhad Shafai, vice president, Communications Markets at Xilinx.
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