Overview of cloud RAN

Featuring centralized, collaborative, cloud and clean system, the cloud RAN (C-RAN) is deemed to be one of the most promising evolution trends towards future network. This paper provides an overview on the study progress of C-RAN, covering the major challenges, the potential solutions, the initial study results and the relevant activities in the industry and academia. There are two key challenges. One is the fiber consumption due to centralization feature and the other is the implementation of virtualization. While WDM is the most promising solution to address the fiber consumption with several successful trials by operators, for virtualization, there are still several challenges, including optimization on hypervisor, operating systems, management functions and I/O virtualization before realizing C-RAN cloudization.