Where does it find the processing power?
Fujitsu has promised telco carriers it can give them a combination boiler that functions as both a virtualized 5G base station and multi-access edge computing (MEC). Its guided by artificial intelligence and has unlimited potential for processing apps like augmented and virtual reality. Since all these apps can use the same computing resources, they can be shared and re-allocated according to needs, so it’s cheap, powerful and energy efficient. It’s achieved with a 5G vRAN system comprising Fujitsu’s virtualized computing unit (vCU) and virtualized distribution (vDU) with NVIDIA’s GPU technology.
Fujitsu supplemented the vRAN technology that it unveiled in March 2022 with chip maker Nvidia’s A100X Graphical processing engine and its Aerial SDK. These allow it to carry out base station processing while laying down a complete artificial intelligence framework that copes with any workload, from carriers to enterprise customers. The system creates parallel base station and computing functions pooling its units of processing power (GPUs) and allocating these resources. The GPUs can be used for more processing power for wireless comms and scale for future antenna technology improvements as needed.
Telcos and enterprise customers can now get digitisation on a global scale, said Masaki Taniguchi, Senior Vice President at Fujitsu’s Mobile System Business Unit. The system was developed as part of the 5G Open RAN Ecosystem (OREC) project promoted by NTT DoCoMo, which also supported performance verification and evaluation tests of the new solution.
“The software defined 5G vRAN and edge AI applications in an all-in-one, GPU accelerated, system. By combining NVIDIA’s Aerial for 5G, XR for virtual reality and Omniverse for digital twins, the same GPU enabled server can power AI applications and provide an immersive experience of digital and real twins world, over a 5G network,” said Sadayuki Abeta, Global Head of Open RAN Solutions at NTT DoCoMo.
The system applies NVIDIA’s GPU processing engine A100X to the physical layer processing at the base station, which allows for parallel processing of virtualized base stations and edge applications on GPU hardware resources in an all-in-one configuration that allows each function to be built on the same server. This is what enables telcos to build a flexible open network with a simple device configuration that can be ramped up with a variety of functions. The solution further offers more radio unit (RU) capacity and processing power, provides a high-quality communications environment, and is able to handle high-load data processing along with future improvements in antenna technologies.
With this new system, Fujitsu aims to contribute to the global expansion of the open 5G network in cooperation with telecom operators including NTT DoCoMo.
See it at the Fujitsu stand at MWC Barcelona 2023, from February 27.