radisys.com 9
Radisys Series — Who Disaggregated My RAN?
eBook
The O-RAN Alliance has a working group focused on developing reference designs for white box hardware for
various RAN deployment scenarios. The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) continues to be a vibrant community of Open
RAN hardware and software providers. The Open Compute Project is working to standardize white-box hardware
for use in data centers and telecom networks. These open hardware designs are available to any vendor. As a result,
multiple vendors are now offering RAN solutions that run on general-purpose hardware.
Figure 1 shows how a combination of COTS hardware and open interfaces from the standards forums enable truly
Open RAN solutions for deployments with a variety of hardware and software options to choose from.
In the case of small cells, typically reference SoC
platforms with PHY and radio functions are available
with option 6 split advocated by the Small Cell Forum.
The Small Cell Forum ensures open interfaces through
FAPI and nFAPI interfaces which are available as
standards that any vendor can implement as shown in
Figure 2. This has led to a thriving ecosystem of small
cell technology providers.
Figure 1: A truly white box view of an O-RAN based radio network
Figure 2: 5G Small Cell Solution – Hardware and software
components
