How can vRAN boost energy efficiency?
Many of the energy efficiency benefits from virtualized RAN (vRAN) come from pooling a collection of Distributed Units (DUs) or Centralized Units (CUs). If you’re able to reduce the number in use, you’ve got fewer servers and that are consuming less power. There’s a number of innovations that are being developed by Fujitsu Network Communications that can go beyond this.
Saving power in Distributed Units
With dynamic resource allocation, which is developed by Fujitsu, we’re able to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to predict the traffic load across a number of DUs. And then if the Radio Units (RUs) are connected to those DUs using an eCPRI (evolved Common Public Radio Interface) switch, then during a maintenance window, we can groom those radios onto a smaller subset of the Distributed Units, and that allows us to turn off some of the Distributed Units, which of course, saves power.
A great example of this is in a stadium. A stadium has high levels of traffic during game day or during an event, but the rest of the time, it’s not really needed. So, you can keep all the radios up there that you may need for coverage, but you can groom them onto just a single Distributed Unit and turn the power off to all the others.
Centralized Units save energy with vRAN autoscale
Another solution from Fujitsu is vRAN autoscale. vRAN autoscale works the same way as dynamic resource allocation, but instead of grooming radios to a smaller number of DUs, we’re grooming the number of DUs onto a smaller number of Centralized Units. And in this way, we’re able to save power by turning off servers that aren’t really needed at that point in time while preserving the ability to add capacity later when it’s needed.
