According to SNS Research's latest research, the NFV and SDN investments on the RAN segment alone will account for over $5 Billion by 2020, focusing primarily on cloud RAN (C-RAN) deployments. The C-RAN is based around the idea of replacing traditional base station nodes with a centralized baseband processing pool serving a number of distributed radio access nodes.
Wireless carriers worldwide are embarking on NFV and SDN technologies in the effort to reduce the total cost of ownership, covering multitude of areas including RAN, mobile core, OSS/BSS, backhaul and CPE/home environment. Telecom's network virtualization will not only provide cost savings but operational leanness by leveraging on common hardware and network management .
