AT&T is collaborating with Intel on an Advanced base station distributed unit (DU) pooling technology designed to deliver unprecedented levels of elasticity in the RAN.
AT&T says DU pooling provides the greatest value in C-RAN or Centralized RAN network deployments where RAN baseband equipment from many cell sites are “pooled together” into a “cloud” of general purpose processors in far edge data centers or central offices. Furthermore, through an advanced form of DU pooling called Class II pooling, a single 5G radio can now distribute the baseband processing for each user device in the cell across multiple servers.
DU pooling technology was made possible by combining AT&T’s Open RAN technologies as one of the co-founders of the O-RAN Alliance with Intel’s expertise in general purpose processors and software-based RAN through its FlexRAN software stack running on Intel 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The open standards for communications between radios and DUs that were published by O-RAN enabled its development, and the result is a technology demonstrator implemented on FlexRAN software.
https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2022/cloudifying-5g-with-elastic-ran.html
