Fujitsu announced yesterday that it has successfully delivered its O-RAN ALLIANCE-compliant 5G virtualised RAN solution for use in Japan's largest mobile operator by subscriptions, NTT DOCOMO's 5G commercial network services, which are set to commence in September 2023. In its statement, Fujitsu highlighted its ongoing efforts to develop the Open RAN ecosystem.
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Fujitsu's Commitment to 5G and Open RAN
Fujitsu said it is committed to supporting digital transformation (DX) and the development of dynamic new services for its customers by applying 5G solutions to a range of real-world industry use cases. Fujitsu also plans to deliver 5G virtualised RAN solutions with the aim of reducing total CO2 emissions by 50 percent or more compared to conventional technologies by 2025.
Solution Details
The solution consists of the 'Wind River Studio' cloud platform of Wind River, an NVIDIA converged accelerator and the NVIDIA Aerial vRAN software development kit, which is responsible for the physical layer control, and a general-purpose Intel Architecture (IA) server.
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Fujitsu's new solution will purportedly offer potential customers greater flexibility in selecting equipment, commercial-grade reliability, and cost-effective infrastructure when considering the deployment of 5G commercial network services.
NTT DOCOMO commented, "Open RAN is essential for onward development of mobile networks. Especially, vRAN is key in realising flexible network evolution. At this time, the 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."
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Open Fronthaul Interface
To realise multi-vendor connectivity by combining various wireless devices (O-RUs) provided by global suppliers, Fujitsu said it has implemented an open fronthaul interface that conforms to O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications.
According to the statement, DOCOMO has selected Fujitsu's base station as the first O-RAN-compliant 5G virtualised base station for its 5G commercial network. This selection is based on its high-performance GPU, flexible open fronthaul architecture, and the ability to further reduce power consumption.
