Fujitsu has made a significant announcement regarding its successful delivery of an O-RAN ALLIANCE-compliant 5G virtualized RAN solution to be used in NTT Docomo’s 5G network services starting in September 2023.
This development showcases Fujitsu’s commitment to supporting its customers and advancing the Open RAN ecosystem through technological innovation on a global scale.
The key aspects of Fujitsu’s virtualized RAN solution include:
Components and Architecture:
The solution comprises the “Wind River Studio” cloud platform from Wind River, an NVIDIA converged accelerator, the NVIDIA Aerial vRAN software development kit responsible for physical layer control, and a general-purpose Intel Architecture (IA) server.
Fujitsu has implemented an open fronthaul interface adhering to O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications to achieve multi-vendor connectivity with various wireless devices (O-RUs) from global suppliers.
Features and Benefits:
The solution offers potential customers greater flexibility in selecting equipment, ensuring commercial-grade reliability and cost-effective infrastructure for the deployment of 5G commercial network services.
The architecture enables multi-vendor connectivity, allowing for equipment selection from different suppliers and contributing to the overall efficiency and reliability of the network.
DOCOMO Collaboration:
NTT Docomo has chosen Fujitsu’s base station as the first O-RAN compliant 5G virtualized base station in its 5G commercial network, recognizing its high-performance GPU, flexible open fronthaul architecture, and power consumption reduction capabilities.
Environmental Considerations:
Fujitsu emphasizes its commitment to environmentally-friendly network solutions, aiming to potentially reduce total CO2 emissions by 50 percent or more compared to conventional technologies by 2025.
Sadayuki Abeta, OREX Evangelist, Global Business Department, NTT Docomo, said: “Development of high performance vRAN with Fujitsu base station software and NVIDIA GPU as hardware accelerator has been completed. It will contribute to further development of DOCOMO’s network, and will promote more efficient global deployment of Open RAN by accumulating commercial know-how.”
Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President, Telecom, NVIDIA, said: “In the development of O-RAN, Fujitsu and NVIDIA have collaborated to provide a software-defined, scalable and flexible vRAN solution with NVIDIA Converged Accelerators including GPUs and DPUs.”
Paul Miller, Chief Technology Officer, Wind River, said: “With the integration of our distributed cloud platform and Fujitsu’s vCU and vDU applications, Wind River can continue to deliver proven technology based on Wind River Studio that is live with operators in global deployments.”
Masaki Taniguchi, SVP, Head of Mobile System Business Unit, said: “Fujitsu’s embrace of open network architecture is central to our efforts to develop secure mobile solutions, contributing to the business development and digitalization of DOCOMO.”