“The RAN is by far the most costly and complex part of a CSP network as workloads that run there require ultra-low latency and high performance,” says VMWare’s Stephen Spellicy, “our ongoing work with Cohere Technologies shows the value of disaggregating hardware functions and moving them to the telco cloud. Our solution is designed to help accelerate RAN automation, optimization, and monetization by enabling CSPs to deploy intelligent, cloud-native RAN applications created by a growing xApp developer community.”
The solution will bring together:
- VMware’s RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) Platform
- Cohere’s Spectrum Multiplier and Cloud Scheduler xApps
The RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) is a new function introduced by the O-RAN Alliance that enables CSPs to deploy cloud-native control and management apps in the RAN. Essentially, it virtualizes the RAN Centralized Units (CUs) and Distributed Units (DUs), where complex RAN intelligence was previously embedded.
VMware has designed its RIC platform keeping developer experience at the center and offers a RIC Software Developer Kit (SDK) to any third-party developer to build apps that can be deployed in the RAN. Today most of these apps are geared toward making the network faster, including Cohere’s Spectrum Multiplier xApp.
Cohere’s Spectrum Multiplier and Cloud Scheduler xApps improve spectral efficiency for CSPs by as much as 2x by enabling existing mobile networks to communicate with multiple users simultaneously on the same time and frequency resources. This is achieved by using dynamic and smart pairing as well as precoding techniques.
The result is claimed to be improved spectral efficiency and network latency that helps CSPs deliver a better user experience and ease capacity bottlenecks when demand is high. It makes their network better equipped to deliver bandwidth-sensitive services like AR/VR streaming, 360/4K videos, and immersive gaming, among others.
“Cohere is the first company to overcome the latency challenges of moving critical intelligence from the RAN to the cloud using VMware’s RIC Platform,” says Cohere CEO Ray Dolan.
The product is expected to be available by the end of the calendar year.