Is cloud RAN the magic bullet for small cells? Monica Paolini of Senza Fili Consulting and Renuka Bhalerao of Radisys discuss the technology, including the difference between cloud RAN and true virtualized RAN, as well as the challenges with fronthaul.
“There are many ways in which you can move from the current situation where you have the RAN all distributed to the situation where you have the vRAN, which is sort of the endgame,” said Paolini. “In the vRAN, everything is virtualized, all the hardware and software. This is sort of the end game. Is that feasible today? No. But there are a lot of models which are becoming much more popular and will lead us to vRAN.”