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radisys.com 8 Radisys Series — Who Disaggregated My RAN? eBook Chapter 2: RAN Ecosystem – New and Improved In my first blog in this new Who Disaggregated My RAN? series, "How it All Falls in Place," I provided the background that led to the industry's push for the adoption of an open and disaggregated RAN. Based on my engagements with the entire ecosystem of Open RAN technology providers in these forums and through our customer base on behalf of Radisys, I can share that there is an exciting whole new landscape of Open RAN technology. Let's take a look! COTS Hardware for RAN—Really? The traditional RAN was a monolithic base station with all of the functionality integrated. It had multiple components – a baseband processing unit, cabling and connectors, the Radio processing unit and the antenna – provided as a single RAN package by the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). As it was a monolithically designed architecture, mobile operators were left with little to no say on how the RAN was built and could not choose best-of-breed components. A disaggregated RAN architecture, however, allows the base station to be split into three distinct parts – a centralized unit (CU), a distributed unit (DU), and a radio unit (RU). This opens up a new realm of possibilities, allowing operators to choose different hardware based on the needs of the particular node. The CU and the DU can be provided by different hardware vendors, and operators can choose the amount of processing power and additional functionalities that they require. Initially hardware was specialized, perhaps using X86 based or ARM based processors, and customized for the traditional RAN vendors. Today the RAN can run on general-purpose hardware "white boxes" like in a data center with the software functionality completely decoupled from the underlying hardware. While this separation is taken for granted in enterprise data centers, it is just now gaining traction in the mobile network.

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