Nokia announces commercial availability of its next-gen 5G AirScale Cloud RAN

Finnish telecom major Nokia has announced that its next-generation 5G AirScale Cloud RAN solution based on vRAN2.0 will be commercially available this year with general availability expected in 2021, following a series of successful trials.

Nokia’s first-generation 5G AirScale Cloud RAN based on vRAN1.0, which has a virtualized Central Unit (vCU), has been in commercial operation on a mmWave network in the U.S. since early 2019.

Now, the company's new vRAN2.0 solution will introduce a virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) as well as a Fronthaul Gateway.

Hence, the result is a fully cloudified and disaggregated 5G base station that provides scalability, low latency, high performance, and capacity, as well as several network architecture options, to meet ever-increasing market demands, reveals Nokia.

The solution helps operators to generate revenue from new 5G services as well as to enable flexible end-to-end network slicing, meet IoT requirements and bring the overall benefits of cloud computing to Radio Access Networks (RAN).

The first Nokia 5G AirScale Cloud RAN solution with a vCU in vRAN1.0 configuration was taken into large-scale commercial use in the U.S. in 2019. Since then, Nokia has evolved the solution to vRAN2.0 configuration with a Distributed Unit (DU) running on General Purpose Processor (x86)-based computing with hardware acceleration in Layer 1 (L1).

Nokia revealed that the company has now successfully completed end-to-end 5G data calls in a full end-to-end system consisting of Nokia Cloud Packet Core, Nokia 5G AirScale Cloud RAN in vRAN2.0 configuration with full baseband in Cloud, Nokia Fronthaul Gateway, and a commercial 5G device.

Both real-time and non-real-time sensitive baseband computing across vDU and vCU ran in x86-based Nokia AirFrame Open Edge Servers and Nokia AirFrame Rackmount Servers. Standard off-the-shelf Intel Vista Creek hardware acceleration was used for specific parts of the real-time sensitive L1 computing in the vDU. This helps to boost the performance even further without impacting the fully cloud-based implementation.

Since 2018, Nokia Bell Labs has been working on the potential of using Graphics Processing Units for hardware acceleration, and Nokia expects these ‘vRAN3.0’ solutions to become mature in 2022.