As O-RAN Standards Rise in Adoption, KDDI Taps Wind River for its 5G Virtualized Base Station

According to a report published by Market&Markets, the OPEN (News - Alert) RAN Market is expected to grow to over $32 Billion by 2030, clocking a 42% rise between 2022 and 2030.

"While 5G offers superior performance over 4G, both will coexist comfortably into the 2030s as the bedrock of next-generation mobile networks," the report also said, adding that 4G and 5G networks can coexist for a long while because the transition from 4G to 5G does not imply or require a paradigm shift in the philosophy of the underlying technology.

That said, 5G is expected to dominate the OPEN RAN market with a $22B TAM in 2030, with a growth rate of 52% compared to a 4G growth rate of 31% between 2022 and 2030.

Recently, Wind River announced that its Wind River Studio is being used by KDDI (News - Alert) for KDDI’s O-RAN-compliant 5G virtualized base station, which began commercial deployment this January in Osaka, Japan.

For its 5G virtualized base station, KDDI uses Wind River Studio Cloud Platform technology for an automated configuration (zero-touch provisioning) system. Wind River (News - Alert) Studio Analytics is used to monitor the status of geographically distributed far-edge clouds. Studio addresses the complex challenges service providers face in deploying and managing geographically distributed, ultra-low latency infrastructure and enables the large-scale deployment of 5G virtualized base stations.

"Operators can work with Wind River for solutions to help prepare for a cloud-native future and deliver on high-reliability, ultra-low-latency, and highly efficient solutions for next-generation networks," said Avijit Sinha, chief product officer of Wind River. "Working closely with leaders such as KDDI, Wind River can deliver proven technology based on Wind River Studio that is live with operators in global deployments."

KDDI is developing virtualized base stations that implement an open interface compliant with the O-RAN standard as a software update to such base stations, which were successfully commercially deployed in February 2022.

Wind River has played vital roles in the world's first successful 5G data session and in building commercial vRAN/O-RAN programs, including one of the largest Open RAN networks in the world.

Studio Cloud Platform provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. It delivers a foundation for a geographically distributed managed solution able to simplify Day 1 and Day 2 operations by providing single-pane-of-glass, zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes, no matter where their physical location is.

Studio also addresses the challenges of deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud-native infrastructure to provide traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/Open RAN deployment.

According to Wind River, analytics solutions reduce carrier efforts and improve the efficiency of monitoring and operating the distributed cloud by collecting and analyzing cloud behavioral data to generate meaningful insights for decision-making.


Edited by Erik Linask