Nokia highlights Cloud RAN ideological schism with ‘In-Line’ trial

Opinion is divided on the best approach to layer 1 acceleration in the Cloud RAN, with Nokia and Ericsson picking different teams.

Today Nokia announced what they claim is the industry’s first trial, in partnership with Finnish operator Elisa, of Cloud RAN powered by In-Line acceleration. Nokia is positioning this trial as a proof-point of its ‘anyRAN’ Cloud RAN strategy. The over-the-air trial used the 3.5 GHz band, a Nokia reference design, container-as-a-service software from Red Hat and an x86 server architecture. The silicon partners weren’t named.

“This important trial with our long-term partner, Elisa, confirms the effectiveness and maturity of Nokia’s anyRAN approach and our open Cloud RAN architecture powered by In-Line L1 acceleration,” said Mark Atkinson, Head of RAN at Nokia. “Unlike other suppliers, we commit to feature parity between Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN and we ensure that our customers can flexibly evolve to Cloud RAN with choices in Cloud infrastructure and data center hardware.”

You may have noticed a degree of competitive snarkiness in that final sentence, leading you to wonder who those other suppliers might be. In its report on a recent Nokia Cloud RAN whitepaper, Light Reading points the finger firmly at Nokia’s big rival Ericsson. It turns out Ericsson prefers the alternative method of layer 1 acceleration called ‘Look-Aside’, you see.

The Nokia whitepaper explains that the point of Cloud RAN is to be able do the baseband processing on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) server hardware, which in turn will bring ‘typical cloud computing benefits’. It goes on to examine the two L1 acceleration (i.e. processing) options, noting that so-called general purpose CPUs are nothing of the kind in this context, since they require integrated Look-Aside accelerators, leading to a less efficient option than its favoured In-line.

It’s all fairly arcane but the Light Reading piece is as good a summary of the matter as we’ve read. There you will see that Ericsson favours Look-Aside, but so far seems to be less publicly strident on the matter. At this stage it’s very difficult to assess who has the stronger case but it does seems clear that the matter is likely to represent yet another telecoms ideological schism as Cloud RAN becomes more commonplace.

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