Orange conducted a trial of Cloud RAN technology in its live network in Poland in conjunction with Nokia.
The trial, which used Orange's own cloud infrastructure, took place from March to the beginning of May in Poland, with radio sites in the city of Chelm and the virtualized part of the baseband running in a data center in Lublin, around 70 km away.. The two companies trialed Cloud RAN technology to prepare for the eventual introduction of a distributed cloud architecture for 5G by Orange.
Nokia's architecture splits baseband processing functionality across the radio cell sites and data center using its AirScale Cloud Base Station. Time-critical functions are performed at the cell site and connected via Ethernet fronthaul - allowing the operator to use its existing transport network - while centralized software hosted at the data center cost-efficiently performs non real-time functions.
About the trial
- Nokia AirScale Cloud Base Station, a virtual base station for 4G and 5G, running 4G technology via Ethernet fronthaul
- Orange's NGPop cloud infrastructure
- Nokia AirFrame Data Center platform designed to meet stringent radio access capacity, performance and latency requirements
- Nokia Cloud Infrastructure for Radio/Real Time
- Nokia NetAct monitoring Cloud RAN and classical RAN in the commercial network
Piotr Jaworski, CTO of Orange Poland, said: "During this trial, Orange Poland has successfully trialed virtualized RAN architectures in collaboration with Nokia and investigated the impact on network operations. The quality and performance observed during the trial give confidence on the RAN virtualization and is a critical step for us towards 5G."
