Samsung Electronics this week announced it continues to collaborate with industry-leading innovators—including providers of chipsets, cloud platforms, and servers—to expand the 5G vRAN ecosystem.
This is an effort to drive multiparty collaboration and innovation for the advancement of software-based networks. With this ecosystem, the parties continue to advance vRAN towards a more scalable, flexible network that delivers carrier-grade performance, management and reliability.
Samsung is the global leader in the fully-virtualized 5G RAN market. The company’s achievement was driven by its 5G vRAN solution, which has been deployed around the world, making Samsung the only major network vendor to have delivered fully-virtualized commercial RAN deployments in North America, Europe and Asia. Samsung delivered its 5G vRAN solutions for a large-scale commercial network service in the U.S. that launched in December 2020, providing reliable mobile services to millions of users.
Samsung’s commercially-proven network solutions range from traditional RAN to virtualized RAN to Open RAN—supporting operators’ 5G path of choice. To advance virtualization and openness, Samsung’s 5G vRAN splits the baseband functions into a fully disaggregated virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtualized Central Unit (vCU). The key to this disaggregated architecture is that the RAN software is separated from customized hardware and runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. Samsung’s vRAN also supports O-RAN specifications, “opening up” interfaces between the baseband unit and radios, allowing integration from different vendors.
Samsung’s vRAN solution fully disaggregates the hardware and software in the baseband, and can support the open fronthaul interface. The company’s O-RAN compliant 5G vRAN solutions are deployed commercially in Japan and U.K. networks, offering seamless integration with other vendor’s radios.
As a pioneer and leader in vRAN technology, Samsung has brought together various companies for collaboration in this ecosystem—starting with Dell, HPE, Intel, Red Hat and Wind River. Samsung has tested and validated interoperability with each company platform, which collectively holds a comprehensive view of the network evolution at every step of the development process. The ecosystem will help in the preparation for commercial deployments, including conducting various activities in Samsung’s lab—aligning solution roadmaps from multiple vendors, fostering a fully interoperable approach to vRAN and leading the design process of an end-to-end vRAN solution.
Woojune Kim, EVP, Head of Global Sales & Marketing, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics
While many vendors claim they support Open RAN by starting with the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), in reality, this is still far from commercialization in large-scale networks and sidesteps the most important part of the Open RAN revolution—which starts from the disaggregation of hardware and software in the baseband, and also involves opening of the fronthaul.
