Korean operator SK Telecom and Japanese telco NTT Docomo released a new white paper pointing out key requirements of telecommunications carriers during the introduction and development of virtualisation base stations. The study considers the impacts on future generations, such as 5G Advanced and 6G.
In the white paper, the companies presented the key elements needed to improve the performance of virtualised base stations compared to the existing ones.
Examples include the evolution of hardware accelerator technology, the development of virtualization-specific technologies, the development of power-saving technologies, the improvement of integration between virtualisation base station components, and the consideration of the evolution of the 6G network.
The research also predicts that hardware accelerator technology, an important component of virtualised base stations, will evolve in multiple directions, including accelerator-in CPUs, inline accelerators, and more, improving cell capacity and power consumption.
“From the business point of view, it is a meaningful white paper that contains realistic concerns and efforts for the development of the core areas of OpenRAN,” said Ryu Tak-ki, SK Telecom’s infrastructure technology manager.
The paper also addressed accelerator technologies for signal processing in vRAN base station equipment. It centres on conducting technical analysis of capacity, power consumption, and complexity across different accelerator structures and network architectures based on proprietary studies.
6G Effort
SK Telecom and NTT Docomo signed a strategic partnership in 2022 to cooperate in studying communication infrastructure, media, and metabus and have continued to work closely following the publication of the 5G and 6G joint technology white paper in 2023.
