Wind River partners with Intel to deliver leading 5G vRAN solution to FlexRAN

Wind River, the world’s leading provider of intelligent system software, recently announced that it is working with Intel to develop a 5G vRAN solution that integrates Intel FlexRAN reference software for third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI acceleration capabilities. It is also equipped with Intel Ethernet 800 network adapter and Intel vRAN dedicated accelerator ACC100, which can be perfectly coordinated with Wind River Studio. The collaboration will build on these innovations and further optimize for the new capabilities offered by future next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids). The collaborative solution builds on Intel and Wind River’s 5G milestone project at Verizon, in which Verizon completed the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized 5G data session.

Wind River Studio is a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operation and service of mission-critical intelligent systems. The cloud infrastructure is a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes container architecture based on the StarlingX open source project, which can be used to deploy and manage distributed edge networks at scale. Ready to use out of the box, Studio is an optimized, ultra-low latency, small footprint infrastructure that gives operators the flexibility to expand into new services and further improve TCO. Intel FlexRAN is a vRAN reference implementation for virtualized cloud radio access networks.

5G networks are evolving towards cloud-native, and operators are pursuing vRAN for greater flexibility. They are optimistic about the potential of vRAN as an anchor tenant for the remote edge cloud and are eager to overcome past implementation challenges. According to a study by leading consultancy Heavy Reading, operators rank the following three areas as typical key challenges facing vRAN: system integration (58% agree), operational complexity of multi-vendor vRAN (46% agree) and edge Cloud server performance (36% agree).

Prospective customers and vRAN solution providers can experimentally test the Intel FlexRAN Reference Software Evaluation Kit pre-integrated with Wind River Studio, which simplifies and accelerates 5G vRAN commissioning and deployment, as part of the recently launched Wind River Studio package Intel Select Solutions for Virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) goes a step further.

Kevin Dallas, President and CEO of Wind River, said: “5G opens up new opportunities for a variety of industries, and there is a growing need to bring greater intelligence and computing power to the edge of the network to support new use cases. As a result, Operators must adopt low-latency far-edge cloud architectures to open up new application scenarios in a world dominated by intelligence and AI. We partner with Intel to deliver best-in-class differentiated solutions to help customers for their next generation The network provides products with high reliability, ultra-low latency and high performance.”

“Operators are eager to gain new advantages and are aggressively adopting virtualized, software-defined architectures,” said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Networking Platforms Group. “Our products, ecosystem and years of experience help them accelerate their journey to Flexible, agile network transformation. Working closely with innovators like Wind River, we provide operators with a fast track to successful vRAN deployments with proven hardware and software that accelerates 5G goals.”

Wind River has been leading the way in the early stages of 5G development, providing the core technology for most 5G RAN deployments. Wind River Studio helps operators solve the complex challenges faced in deploying and managing geographically dispersed, ultra-low latency cloud-native infrastructure.