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Radisys Series — Who Disaggregated My RAN?
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One of the other trends fueling the push for disaggregated RAN adoption deployment is Multi-access Edge
Computing (MEC). As cloud solutions grew and the 4th Industrial Revolution gained ground, industries and
operators alike recognized the need for increased computing demands delivered with greater speed and lower
latency could be achieved by pushing compute from the data center out to the network's edge. Operators realized
that, given RAN functions, MEC can co-locate at some edge locations, allowing them to provide increased network
services where central office-based solutions could not.
Creating Alphabet Soup?
As industry initiatives demonstrated the viability of a disaggregated RAN, operators began looking for vendors
capable of enabling a disaggregated RAN. This led to a number of vendor companies forming their own initiatives
to develop their ecosystems and promote interoperability among their partners.
At the same time, industry initiatives were launching to solve interoperability challenges and to define properly
nodes and interfaces in a disaggregated RAN. Unlike vendor-led initiatives, which tended to orient toward
specific products, the Standard Development Organization initiatives sought to align and standardize reference
architectures for deployment scenarios, define truly interoperable interfaces and accelerate deployment of
solutions based on Open RAN philosophy. Three of the key SDO initiatives include:
1. The OpenRAN Project Group: An initiative within TIP working to define and build 2G, 3G and 4G RAN
solutions based on a general-purpose vendor neutral hardware and software-defined technology.
Figure 2
