Ericsson Cloud RAN, the Swedish vendor’s answer for virtualized radio access network (vRAN) architecture, will support mid-band spectrum in the second half of 2022. It also plans to add support for massive multiple-input, multi-output (MIMO) antenna arrays, which are crucial in mid-band deployments. 

Cloud RAN remains on target for commercial availability by the end of this year with support for low-band networks, and the vendor expects vRAN to get underway in earnest next year, Per Narvinger, head of product area networks at Ericsson, told SDxCentral in an interview. 

Ericsson first revealed a framework and a set of goals for Cloud RAN in late 2020. However, unlike its closest competitor Nokia, which has gone so far as to call open RAN the future of the radio business, Ericsson’s approach is more tempered. Ericsson’s willingness to disaggregate hardware and software with open interfaces stops at vRAN. 

Cloud RAN specifically targets the virtualized compute component of the RAN, a framework that splits the baseband into centralized and distributed units with virtualization. The early phase of Cloud RAN will rely on Intel accelerators, but the company is working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to support edge compute workloads running on HPE servers.

Ericsson expects to add support for additional vendors and public clouds down the line, but it’s not making any commitments to that effect now. The vendor also foresees a role for vRAN in millimeter-wave spectrum, according to Narvinger, but that will require faster baseband processing on compute resources. 

The vendor might see a more promising role for vRAN in high-band spectrum precisely because it’s limiting its activities to the compute portion and not the radios. “It’s a journey,” Narvinger said, adding that there were doubts about the use of hardware accelerators in vRAN a couple years ago, but those concerns have proven to be resolved. 

“Many of our customers have already deployed 5G and we truly believe they’re going to continue at a full pace on our current existing purpose-built hardware,” Narvinger said, adding that performance characteristics of vRAN compute are largely dependent on how much power can be squeezed into a server. “We are now coming to a point where we see it is close enough to purpose built. There will still be a difference, but the gap is not larger than we expect our customers to go with.”

The vendor also introduced Cloud Link software that allows operators to connect vRAN and traditional RAN frameworks with other resources such as dynamic spectrum sharing and carrier aggregation.

“Cloud Link can link back to all our radios, as well as our existing compute solutions, basebands out in the field,” he explained. Ericsson refers to vRAN networks that are added alongside traditional RAN as “bluefield deployments,” something in between a greenfield and brownfield network. 

“What Ericsson is doing goes beyond stacking new technologies above existing radio access. Instead, Ericsson raises innovative possibilities for performance gains by combining Cloud RAN mid-band with 7 million Ericsson Radio System radios in the field,” Joe Madden, chief analyst at Mobile Experts, said in a statement.

“The coordinated use of vRAN and pre-integrated radios involves optimization and interoperability between generations, which should reduce overall lifetime cost for operators,” he added.