The rise of virtualized and open radio access network (RAN) architecture is upending traditional wireless infrastructure and creating space for smaller vendors like Samsung to grow in kind.

Samsung released its first 5G vRAN portfolio earlier this year and highlighted Verizon as the first operator to commercially deploy the new equipment. The company claimed it was the first large-scale commercial vRAN deployment at that time. 

Now it’s riding the tailwinds of that early achievement to differentiate itself from larger RAN vendors while arguing that its technical staff and engineers have developed a system that is already competitive with traditional RAN architecture.

“While there has been industry discussions that suggest that vRAN performance could be lower than purpose built, vendor-specific solutions, Samsung’s vRAN offers proof that performance equal to traditional hardware-based equipment is achievable,” Farook Hussan, senior director of technology at Samsung’s Network Division, wrote in response to questions.

Most of the debates about the competitiveness of vRAN and open RAN are framed around capex, opex, and power consumption because these represent the largest costs for mobile network operators. But making those comparisons to traditional RAN is a complex exercise, and those details also have to be measured against other advantages and the needs of each respective operator, Hussan explained. 

“Virtualized RAN offers more deployment flexibility and supports swift transition with integrated hardware and software infrastructure,” he said. “vRAN also eliminates many hardware dependencies, making vRAN an attractive technology option for the operators from both a long-term capex and opex perspective.” 

Samsung’s internal analysis on these costs and capabilities concluded that a centralized vRAN deployment can reduce total cost of ownership by 13% and opex by 25% over the duration of a five-year period compared to a distributed RAN framework. 

Other benefits impacting those costs include the use of common, off-the-shelf hardware and a common platform for the RAN, core, and 5G applications, according to a research paper recently published by Samsung. 

The vendor’s first generation of vRAN includes support for frequency division duplex (FDD) in low-frequency spectrum bands, and it plans to expand its virtualized distributed unit (DU) to provide time division duplex (TDD) support in mid-band spectrum later this year. 

This is part of Samsung’s vision to eventually support what it described as a fully virtualized and consolidated RAN offering. “There are no technical limitations,” Hussan said. “Our vRAN solution has virtualized all the elements of the baseband unit that can be software driven.”

Samsung is committed to “lead the development and commercialization of virtualized networks” and that will require “continuous research on software, but the key may be more on how operators may monetize the flexibility and capabilities of a software-based RAN,” he added.

On the hardware front, Hussan notes there are many types of servers and configurations that can be applied to vRAN, but finding the optimal server for each operator’s deployment and operational environment is one of the major challenges. “Another challenge is the seamless integration among servers, NIC cards, and container as a service platforms,” he said.

Those issues notwithstanding, running vRAN on non-proprietary x86 servers eliminates vendor lock-in and the need for frequent hardware replacements because they can be upgraded more easily with software, according to Hussan.

Hardware accelerators are also required depending on each operator’s desired capacity, bandwidth, and feature set, but not always, he explained. “Some vRAN solutions can be implemented purely in software, while others that have higher performance requirements may require accelerators,” Hussan said. 

Samsung reinforced this point in its latest research on vRAN. “In the initial stages of virtualization, unfortunately, the capacity performance of a fully virtualized DU with software only does not match the performance of a purpose-oriented hardware built with the same cost,” the vendor wrote. “As the processor and platform of the common-off-the-shelf server grows, the performance of the fully virtualized DU is expected to narrow the gap with that of the hardware-based DU over time.”

The initial virtualized DU supports a 4x4 antenna array in the FDD narrow band, but it will support three times that capacity in two years, according to Samsung. The vendor also claims that mid-band TDD will support up to a tripling of capacity in 2023. 

“Our confidence comes from the fact that we already have it working in our labs, we know the limits, and we know what has to be done,” Hussan said.