South Korean operator SK Telecom (SKT) announced it has developed and tested a next-generation virtual base station. According to the company, the new technology improved the power consumption and processing capacity of an open RAN virtual base station and will help prepare the ground for 6G.
The company conducted tests using components manufactured by Samsung Electronics and Ericsson (built-in accelerator), and Nokia (inline accelerator). According to SKT, it confirmed the effect of improving processing capacity and power consumption compared to existing virtual base stations.
“This is a meaningful research and development achievement that improved both the power consumption and processing capacity, which are important in open RAN virtual base stations,” said Ryu Tak-ki, Head of Infrastructure Technology at SK Telecom. “We are looking at it and plan to continue research and development,” he added.
In addition, SKT collaborated with Intel to successfully test AI-based virtual base station power consumption reduction technology.
The algorithm predicts traffic patterns based on AI and controls the on/off operation of each CPU core of the virtual base station server. According to the Korean operator, the results showed that the technology reduced the CPU power consumption to that of the existing virtual base station, saving more than 20% in energy.
Featured image by SK Telecom
