Ericsson Cloud RAN

Ericsson takes leadership in industrializing Open RAN

Cloud RAN - a cornerstone of open architectures

Available in English 日本語

A powerful, versatile, future-proofed cloud-native solution for 5G RAN networks.

Ericsson Cloud RAN (Radio Access Network) is a cloud-native software solution handling compute functionality in the RAN. Cloud RAN is a viable option for communications service providers (CSP) that offers increased flexibility, faster delivery of services, and greater scalability in networks.

Cloud RAN is one of the key pillars of Open RAN and plays an important role in allowing CSPs to seamlessly evolve towards cloud-native technologies and open network architectures, with the vision that our customers can deploy cloud-native networks on any site, any cloud, and any server platform.

What is Cloud RAN?

Cloud RAN is the separation of the RAN baseband software and the RAN baseband hardware. This baseband software can run on any capable commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, with or without integrated accelerators, utilizing cloud-native tools and processes to manage the software and hardware.

This means that baseband RAN software can, in principle, be deployed in many different ways – on cloud hardware on-site, in a CSP-owned data center, or even on a hyperscaler public cloud.

Explore Cloud RAN benefits and how it will co-exist with purpose-built RAN, in this “What’s next for RAN” paper.

Industry leading RAN solution – the foundation for high performing Cloud RAN

Based on our industry leading radios, our unique RAN software with full interworking across platforms, combined with our unrivalled RAN expertise, we design efficient, reliable and high-performing Cloud RAN that meet our customers’ expectations of a carrier-grade RAN.

We are actively collaborating with the cloud ecosystem frontrunners for co-creation of solutions that enable high-capacity deployments based on the unique requirements of a radio access network.

Acceleration technology to meet demanding requirements

With 5G RAN workloads, there is a huge need of computing and acceleration. Where acceleration takes place has been subject to discussions. Considering the needs for energy efficiency, design flexibility, portability, and support for an ecosystem of Cloud RAN suppliers on common cloud infrastructure, Selected Function Hardware Acceleration (sometimes known as ‘look-aside’ acceleration) currently offers the best option to build high-performing Cloud RAN networks.

Take a closer look at accelerators in this paper, giving you an overview of Cloud RAN Acceleration Technology and the blog discussing which Cloud RAN accelerator type is in the lead and why.

Relentless optimization of energy efficiency while improving performance

End-to-end energy efficiency is key to the success of Cloud RAN. Aside from the radio units themselves, we must ensure optimum energy consumption in both the Cloud RAN distributed unit (DU) and Cloud RAN central unit (CU). This can be done by utilizing:

Hardware features to lower energy consumption
Sleep state technology to enable workload power controls
Energy-aware automation

Explore the technical innovation for a best-in-class sustainable portfolio with excellent performance and lower embodied carbon emissions in this blog post Tech Unveiled: Embracing energy efficiency in Open RAN architecture.

Ericsson Open Lab

Ericsson Open Lab provides both virtual and physical lab space environments to share technologies and facilitate innovation. In the lab environment, Ericsson customers can test new deployment and use case scenarios, increase automation, and reduce manual intervention using Ericsson’s Cloud RAN products as a base.

Ericsson-Intel Tech Hub

Based in Ericsson’s D-15 facility in Santa Clara, the Ericsson-Intel Tech Hub focuses on the benefits that the combination of Ericsson Cloud RAN and Intel technologies can bring to improving energy efficiency and network performance, reducing time to market, and monetizing new business opportunities such as enterprise applications.

Collaboration with AMD

The Ericsson-AMD collaboration will see additional processing technologies in the Ericsson Cloud RAN offering. The expanded offering aims to enhance the performance of Cloud RAN and secure high-capacity solutions. The collaboration will enable joint exploration of AMD EPYC processors and T2 Telco accelerator for utilization in Cloud RAN solutions, while also investigating future platform generations of these technologies.

Read more about Ericsson-AMD collaboration.

Collaboration with Dell Technologies

Ericsson is partnering with Dell as a supplier of Dell PowerEdge servers for its Cloud RAN offering. The Ericsson and Dell collaboration will further enable open cloud networks that allow customers to choose their own infrastructure while ensuring telco-grade performance at the far edge.

Read more about Ericsson-Dell collaboration.

Collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

The collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) brings additional flexibility to Cloud RAN deployments, as Ericsson customers will now also have an option to select HPE workload optimized edge compute based on HPE ProLiant servers and any cloud platform to deploy their Cloud RAN networks.

Read more about the Ericsson-HPE collaboration.

Collaboration with Intel

Ericsson Cloud RAN creates more options for communications service providers and delivers a truly cloud agnostic platform, supported by its long-term strategic partner, Intel. The portfolio will leverage Intel’s compute – across multiple product generations of Intel Xeon Scalable processors and accelerator technology, to enable high-density capacity solutions. This enables both companies to deliver the type of performance seen in the most demanding RAN environments in the world.

Read more about Ericsson-Intel collaboration.

Collaboration with Google Cloud

Ericsson Cloud RAN (Radio Access Network) now runs on Google Distributed Cloud, utilizing the x86-based accelerator stack
The joint solution offers integrated automation and orchestration using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and enables communications service providers (CSPs) with faster delivery of services, increased efficiency, and greater flexibility and optimization opportunities in their networks

Collaboration with Red Hat

Our multi-year partnership with Red Hat spans across multiple projects and solutions for Cloud RAN. The key to this successful collaboration is pre-integrated solutions by validating Ericsson Cloud RAN on Red Hat cloud platform, as well as ensuring joint and optimized approaches to managing related services and support in a multi-vendor environment.

This partnership gives our customers increased flexibility when evolving into Cloud RAN, and reduced complexity and time-to-market when they choose Ericsson Cloud RAN with Red Hat.

Ericsson Cloud RAN can be deployed in a multitude of different scenarios, including existing footprints, also known as ‘bluefield deployments’, with full interworking between the two network architectures. Driving this is Ericsson Cloud Link, which enables value-add network technologies such as Ericsson Spectrum Sharing, and 5G Carrier Aggregation to operate across platforms.

Blog: Evaluating greenfield, brownfield, and bluefield deployments in Radio Access Networks (RAN)

Go to portfolio

An accelerated path to the future of Cloud RAN

Selecting the right Cloud RAN platform and cloud infrastructure is important and commercial-off-the-shelf server hardware is the foundation. To meet today’s high-performance expectations of a Radio Access Network, with its unique requirements of time-critical processing, Cloud RAN requires hardware acceleration.

Ericsson and Verizon share our thoughts on the best path forward to deliver on energy efficiency, ecosystem support and flexibility at reduced complexity.

Read paper

An accelerated path to the future of Cloud RAN

Designing the most efficient transport network for Cloud RAN

Service providers invest billions of dollars in 5G networks. They are driven by the urge to provide never before seen network performance and services. How to use the 5G-enabled bandwidth to the maximum? What does it take to design the best-optimized transport network for the Cloud RAN?

Learn more