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An important step in the push for an open, virtualized, and intelligent 5G has been the proliferation of Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN), which seeks to improve Radio Access Network (RAN) flexibility and deployment velocity, while simultaneously reducing the capital and operating costs through the adoption of cloud architectures. O-RAN does this by disaggregating the RAN into multiple components, such as O-RU(O-RAN Radio Unit), O-DU(O-RAN Distributed Unit), O-CU(O-RAN Central Unit), RIC(RAN Intelligent Controller). These components can run as containerized software on commodity servers supplemented with a programmable Acceleration Abstraction Layer (AAL) when necessary. The underlying cloud computing layer that enables the hosting of containerized RAN network functions is also called O-Cloud in O-RAN standards.
This architecture can be represented as three open layers, as shown in Figure 1 below. The commodity hardware servers host a container runtime in order to run the containerized RAN functions. The most commonly used Container Runtime is Kubernetes, which we will use in this blog. For simplicity, only O-CU and O-DU software applications have been shown.