VMware and Cohere Technologies to Bring Intelligent, Cloud-Native Applications to Open Radio Access Networks

As communication service providers (CSPs) move to open radio access network (O-RAN) architectures, the door to innovation opens. Partnering to accelerate this innovation, Cohere Technologies and VMware announced they are developing an O-RAN solution to help CSPs improve network and spectrum efficiencies and deliver new and differentiated services and experiences for their customers.

“The RAN is by far the most costly and complex part of a CSP network as workloads that run there require ultra-low latency and high performance,” said Stephen Spellicy, vice president of product marketing and solutions, Service Provider and Edge, VMware. “Our ongoing work with Cohere Technologies shows the value of disaggregating hardware functions and moving them to the telco cloud. Our solution is designed to help accelerate RAN automation, optimization, and monetization by enabling CSPs to deploy intelligent, cloud-native RAN applications created by a growing xApp developer community.”

The solution will bring together:

• VMware’s RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) Platform
• Cohere’s Spectrum Multiplier and Cloud Scheduler xApps

The RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) is a new function introduced by the O-RAN Alliance that enables CSPs to deploy cloud-native control and management apps in the RAN. Essentially, it virtualizes the RAN Centralized Units (CUs) and Distributed Units (DUs), where complex RAN intelligence was previously embedded. VMware has designed its RIC platform keeping developer experience at the center and offers a RIC Software Developer Kit (SDK) to any third-party developer to build apps that can be deployed in the RAN. Today most of these apps are geared toward making the network faster, including Cohere’s Spectrum Multiplier xApp.

Cohere’s Spectrum Multiplier and Cloud Scheduler xApps improve spectral efficiency for CSPs by as much as 2x by enabling existing mobile networks to communicate with multiple users simultaneously on the same time and frequency resources. This is achieved by using dynamic and smart pairing as well as precoding techniques. The result is improved spectral efficiency and network latency that helps CSPs deliver a better user experience and ease capacity bottlenecks when demand is high. It makes their network better equipped to deliver bandwidth-sensitive services like AR/VR streaming, 360/4K videos, and immersive gaming, among others.

“CSPs are spending tens of billions of dollars on 5G spectrum and being able to get the most out of that investment is critical,” said Ray Dolan, Chairman and CEO of Cohere Technologies. “Cohere is the first company to overcome the latency challenges of moving critical intelligence from the RAN to the cloud using VMware’s RIC Platform. Our software, when running on VMware’s RIC platform, provides CSPs with a powerful solution to extend spectral efficiency and deliver a great user experience to customers accessing 5G services.”

The solution is expected to be available by the end of the calendar year.