Korea Telecom plans world's first commercial Cloud-RAN
Will roll out LTE using a virtualized network based on a Samsung/Intel platform, but barred from refarming 1.8GHz band yet
Published: 8 December, 2011
READ MORE: Spectrum | South Korea | Korea Telecom | Cloud | Infrastructure | LTE
The operators in China, Korea and Japan are far more willing than their western counterparts to think laterally about how they design 4G networks. The world's largest mobile market, and its two most broadband-hungry, are all trialling or deploying the new 'Cloud RANs', at a stage when US and European carriers mainly see them as an option for an LTE-Advanced future.
China Mobile has major Cloud-RAN trials ongoing with various partners including Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Huawei and ZTE. Now, KT has gone one better with a commercial roll-out, aiming to leapfrog its larger mobile rival, SKT. The latter has an advanced strategy for delivering cloud-based services over various access networks (LTE, Wi-Fi, 3G, fiber and copper). But KT - which is also integrating all those access technologies plus WiMAX - is going a step further and placing much of its baseband processing in the cloud too.
This is the central concept of C-RAN, deconstructing the traditional base station to leave a low power unit at the cell site, integrating antenna and radio, while centralizing all the baseband activity and supporting hundreds or thousands of sites flexibly from the cloud. KT calls its LTE approach its Cloud Communications Center (CCC) architecture, and it has been co-developed with Samsung and Intel. The latter is leaping on the opportunity to bring its expertise in servers and data centers to the telco network, and in this case its platforms are integrated with Samsung modems to create a centralized exchange for signals communications processing. This is linked by fiber (essential for C-RAN) to the cell sites.
As seen in vendor strategies like ALU's lightRadio and Nokia Siemens' Liquid Radio, the CCC also harnesses virtualization technology so that the central processing resources can be allocated flexibly according to the peaks and troughs of demand in different sites. Yung Kim, senior EVP head of strategy planning at KT, told TelecomAsia: "For example, at a sports stadium you can dynamically allocate more resources for that area during a game on a millisecond basis." The design also improves coverage at the cell edge, he added, claiming twice the capacity per cell, on average, because of better improved edge management.
The CCC architecture can manage 144 base stations per server and accommodate 1,000 servers in each data center, all them acting as a central processing entity. Most tasks are run on off-the-shelf processors rather than dedicated ASICs, also a key trend to reduce the cost of data networks and to converge the norms of the IT data center with those of telecoms. The performance and power advantages of modern computer processors are now up to the task of massive telecoms networks, believe carriers like KT, hence the intense interest of Intel, although some ARM-based chip vendors like Marvell and Freescale are also pushing from the network into the data center.
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