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Wireless Network Virtualization: Ensuring Carrier Grade Availability

Although 4G LTE is effective at meeting today's increasing bandwidth demands at lower costs than its predecessors, its mobile base station, E-UTRAN Node B (eNB), located at the edge of the radio access network (RAN), is underutilized at certain times of the day and has grown in complexity, resulting in higher downtime and field maintenance costs. As a result, the eNB is a good candidate for network functions virtualization (NFV). The virtualized eNB functions result in significantly higher equipment utilization, cost-efficient redundancy to achieve high availability, and lower operations and maintenance costs when compared to the legacy RAN.

Learn

  • Reliability and cost differences between RAN and C-RAN
  • Key components of an effective C-RAN solution
  • How a carrier grade infrastructure enables NFV solutions like C-RAN and others