Altiostar announced that in cooperation with SK Telecom, the largest mobile operator in Korea, it has successfully completed a field trial of its vRAN technology in Bundang, Korea.
During this field trial, performance and capacity improvement with key LTE-A features such as carrier aggregation, uplink CoMP were validated. The trial utilized SK Telecom’s existing transport network.
Altiostar said its vRAN solution is the virtualized RAN solution with flexible IP/Ethernet Fronthaul and provides all the benefits of C-RAN (Centralized RAN/Cloud RAN) without increased investments on transport infrastructure or frequency spectrum. The vRAN implements an innovative functional split that allows baseband functions to run as virtual network functions (VNF) on COTS hardware at data centers, thereby bringing the benefits of cloud infrastructure such as resource pooling, auto-scaling, auto-recovery and seamless session migration to radio access networks.
Altiostar also announced successful collaboration with SK Telecom to provide Software Defined RAN (SDRAN) solution. The solution is based on SK Telecom’s SDRAN Remote Radio Unit (RRU), which was developed in collaboration with SK Telesys and Altiostar’s Open vRAN Development Platform. The SDRAN RRU is fully-managed from Altiostar Element Management System (EMS) and supports all of the basic and advanced LTE features such as inter-site carrier aggregation, Uplink CoMP (Coordinated Multipoint) and more.
This collaboration successfully establishes the feasibility of an “open” RAN model where the RAN hardware such as RRUs and COTS servers can be purchased by mobile network operators independent of baseband software. Altiostar’s Open vRAN Development Platform includes all of the RAN software, virtual baseband unit (vBBU) and drivers needed for any RAN equipment manufacturer to integrate their RRUs with an established vRAN solution in a short period of time.
Also, with this approach, mobile operators can deploy vRAN on their existing infrastructure, making use of their existing, deployed RRUs, thereby reducing development time, risk and cost, said Altiostar.
Jin-hyo Park,, SVP, Head of Network Technology R&D Center, SK Telecom
This collaboration with Altiostar and SK Telesys establishes feasibility of SDRAN, a concept pioneered by SKT to bring about innovation & increased competition in RAN eco-system and help operators efficiently manage network resources and deliver more services to customers while reducing costs.
Ashraf Dahod, President and CEO, Altiostar
With Altiostar vRAN, mobile operators can unleash the full potential of their existing spectrum and cell sites, ready their network for 5G and receive a significant return on investment when compared to traditional C-RAN technologies.
