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Turkcell and Netsia Demonstrate RAN Slicing in Istanbul
[February 22, 2018]

Turkcell and Netsia Demonstrate RAN Slicing in Istanbul


Turkcell (News - Alert) (NYSE:TKC) (BIST:TCELL) has added a new partnership to the strategic alliances it has made with the world's leading technology companies for the development of 5G technologies. Following the launch of several strategic alliances with leading Turkish and international technology companies and universities aimed at furthering the development of 5G technologies, the successful integration of Netsia's Virtual LTE (News - Alert) RAN Platform into Turkcell's Network Labs located in Istanbul has been completed.

RAN slicing constitutes the cornerstone of any end-to-end slicing initiative, as radio resources are ultimately the basic building blocks to be shared (or sliced) among users. Netsia and Turkcell have worked towards integrating Netsia's platform into Turkcell's Labs, reproducing a Private LTE network with the ability to be sub-divided into multiple slices which, at RAN level, can offer different performances, latencies, and radio resources to different sets of customers. The result of such integration demonstrates that SDN/NFV techniques can be successfully applied to the RAN, hence completing the last piece of the puzzle towards an effective end-to-end network slicing.

Gediz Sezgin, Turkcell's Executive Vice President Network Technologies says: "5G technology will be vital to every field. That's why I think that 5G technology offers Turkey one of the bes opportunities to take a leap forward in the next 10 years. At Turkcell, we are cooperating with the best companies and universities both in the global sphere and in our own country, to ensure that Turkey becomes a nation that has the ability to produce its own technologies and store and processes its own data. We aim to be a pioneer in the establishment of 5G standards and in making the technology available in our country. This is why we partnered with Netsia. The integration of Netsia's Virtual LTE RAN Platform into a commercial LTE core in our Labs is an important step forward to demonstrate that an end-to-end network slicing for 5G networks is possible, from the core to the RAN, and how it can be applied to specific service environments, like that of a virtual Private LTE network."



Oguz Oktay, Netsia's Vice President, Wireless Solutions says: "We have developed ProgRAN as the core technology for the rapid evolution of the telecom networks into multi-purpose networks that will meet the requirements of not only a wide range of user and device characteristics, but also a wide variety of services for many vertical sectors - including those yet to be present. That means a telecom operator will be able to offer differentiated network functions to sectors such as IoT, healthcare or automotive, using an Access-As-A-Service business model. Our partnership with Turkcell has given us the opportunity to develop new use cases based on real market requirements."

Netsia, a technology startup based in Sunnyvale (California) and a subsidiary of Argela, is actively working on programmable Software-Defined RAN Virtualization for 5G and has developed ProgRAN, a programmable Software Defined Network (SDN)-based Radio Access Network framework. ProgRAN virtualizes the wireless channel resources, as well as the radio resource management modules, in base stations, allowing a remote controller to "slice the network" into multiple virtual sub-networks. The virtual Private LTE platform reproduces a hospital scenario where wireless resources are shared among doctors, patients, visitors, and medical equipment. The resource partitioning is safely controlled by the hospital administration in a programmable way to provide wireless access services based on the type of the users and the emergency level at the hospital.



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