Verizon announced it has completed the first end-to-end fully virtualized 5G data session in the US. This technology milestone in the virtualisation of its radio access network is expected to support the operator's development of wide-scale mobile edge computing and network slicing services. Full vRAN deployment will commence in the coming months, the company said.
Virtualizing the RAN, like the virtualization work previously completed in the core of Verizon's network, decouples software and hardware functionality, enabling the network to be built on general purpose hardware. Using Common Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware leads to greater flexibility and agility in the introduction of new products and services like edge computing.
This virtualization will also lower the barrier to entry for new vendors in the ecosystem, Verizon said. New entrants are expected to accelerate innovation, reduce operating costs, and lay the groundwork for flexible network and cloud infrastructure closer to the customer, eventually leading to single digit latency. Key 5G use cases focused on providing the best, most efficient network for customers, will heavily rely on the programmability of virtualized networks, according to the operator.
In the latest demonstration, Samsung provided its commercial 5G virtualized RAN, consisting of a virtualized Central Unit (vCU), a virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU), and radio units. Samsung announced commercial availability of its fully-virtualized 5G RAN last month.
Intel provided its Intel Xeon Scalable processor, Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000 and Intel Ethernet Network Adapter XXV710 to deliver the processing, acceleration and connectivity requirements, and its FlexRAN software reference architecture.
Wind River is providing Verizon with a cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based software infrastructure, which delivers ultra-low latency and high availability for national deployment of virtualized 5G RAN. Wind River’s product is integrated with vRAN applications, providing single-pane-of-glass and zero-touch automated management, and network analytics.
Verizon first announced achievements towards its virtualization efforts in early 2019 when it introduced cloud-native technology in a live wireless core network environment and then demonstrated the technology in a successful trial of the 5G standalone core earlier this year. Following virtualization of the core, Verizon successfully tested virtualization of baseband unit operations in a lab environment in 2019.
