The Impact of RAN Evolution on Customer Experience

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn on March 1st 2021

A new RAN

5G SA is changing the architecture of mobile core networks. The design principles of 5G SA rely on disaggregation. So network functions focus on a limited scope of services to enable cloud-native support for resource elasticity and high availability.

5G RAN is embracing the same design principles which are now at the heart of the O-RAN proposition: Building a C-RAN infrastructure with disaggregated RAN functions, hosted on virtualized or containerized instances, leveraging a cost-effective open architecture.

This comes in with advantages but also challenges that will impact how CSPs are managing RAN network performance and customer experience.

Challenges and Opportunities of the new RAN paradigm

The O-RAN initiative is enabling a new landscape of RAN suppliers, moving away from monolithic infrastructure management. Now we have a multitude of vendors, each delivering and managing specific RAN functions. This vibrancy and evolution in the market will bring costs down as the competitors jostle for position. Good news for the CSPs!

Yet, managing a multitude of vendors will pose challenges when it comes to interoperability and service deployment, and eventually…. costs.

This is putting pressure on international telecom bodies to come up with standards to mitigate the integration risks. In this context, the pledge for O-RAN made by the European “Big 4” recently (Telefonica, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsch Telekom) is an important development.

O-RAN is picking up SON (self-organising network) where we left it years ago by introducing an ML-powered control and orchestration layer (the SMO, Service Management and Orchestration Framework) that analytics systems will be able to interact with. This will allow us to collect intelligence, enrich information, or trigger actions through the Non-RT (non-real-time) and Near-RT Radio Intelligence Controllers (RIC).

This is an exciting and revolutionary opportunity for 3rd-party systems to finally be able to interact with the RAN infrastructure in a smart, targeted, and structured way.

Leveraging the new RAN to improve end-to-end Service Assurance

At Anritsu, we are building service assurance systems that rely on open architecture and cloud-native principles. This enables us to provide an end-to-end view of the service performance and the customer experience impact in both real-time and non-real-time.

The new RAN will be more complicated and thereby makes service assurance more important than ever. The multitude of suppliers for RAN network functions and the growing number of logical networks via cloud network functions, network slicing, and QoS-based billing plans add to this complexity. Interacting with the RAN via RICs will need this network and customer experience view to see services and subscriber impacts.

Our flexible architecture, coupled with extensive domain knowledge, is essential to future-proof service assurance systems and ensures they factor in the impact of new RAN deployments on customer experience and enable automated interactions with RAN orchestration layers.

Please feel free to contact us at Anritsu if you want to explore the topic further.