radisys.com 13
Radisys Series — Who Disaggregated My RAN?
eBook
to deploy their solutions made with variations on the
CPRI standard.
CPRI was widely prevalent, but the amount of
proprietary customization led to interoperability issues.
Ultimately this created a greater lock-in situation for
operators and has become one of the major driving
forces toward an open, disaggregated RAN.
In addition to the interoperability problem, the fiber
bandwidth required to transport LTE data rates using
CPRI transport was huge. Since fiber is expensive, the
inefficiency of CPRI transport became a deployment
issue. Bandwidth became a large challenge with LTE,
and with the evolution of 5G and the further increases
in data rates, many operators are realizing that CPRI has
become unsuitable for their fronthaul needs.
5G Fronthaul Options
Most 5G applications require low-latency, making the fronthaul bandwidth issue an important factor. Depending
on the deployment configurations, 5G can deliver 10x to 100x data rates more than LTE. 5G base stations are
Figure 2: Centralized (C-RAN) Fronthaul
Figure 3: Disaggregated RAN: Fronthaul, Midhaul and Backhaul
