 Radio access networks as we know form the basic component in 3GPP architecture to provide connectivity to the user equipment. Traditionally it has been understood as a base station which provides the base interface to the mobile phone or any other user device. With the emergence of cloud infrastructure it is going to be a miss if you do not consider the current deployments which are taking place in radio access networks using the cloud infrastructure. That is our focus for today. Classically radio access network is part of the communication system that provides connectivity in 4G, 5G environments to the user equipment and in turn allows the backhaul connectivity to be available to the user equipment. So we can think of the user equipment standing and receiving wireless signals to the radio access network and which is then providing wide connectivity to the core network. This is an overview of what is the classical understanding of the evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access network. Here we have an entity called node B and later E node B which is providing a ran connectivity to the user equipment. These E node Bs form a mesh amongst themselves using the X2 interface and using the S1 interface or the star interface they get connected to the serving gateway or the mobility management entity. So cloud ran is essentially the splitting of the hardware and software which was considered to be monolithic in ran. So cloud native software implementation of the ran functionality that is decoupled from the hardware results into some advantages that are intuitive. This is going to result into flexibility and faster service delivery. We will see how this turns out to be faster. The functionality which was otherwise performed as the baseband signal processing through the software would now run on any commercially off the shelf available hardware. So what will happen is that we will have the cloud based software which will be controlling or accessing the hardware which was earlier deployed on site. Now we have some options we can have on site cloud that's known as the private cloud or we could have a data center based cloud service provider established service or we could have a public cloud like AWS. Look at the cloud ran which actually moves the baseband system modules away from the antenna maybe tens or hundreds of kilometers away even in certain situations thousands of kilometers away and move them closer to the core network and offers the pooling capability that is sharing capability to multiple antennas instead of each antenna having its own dedicated ran based functionality. So with this we see that we'll have some advantages which was the first one is immediately going to be the reduction in the total cost of ownership. This is going to result into a very a decreased cost because we are going to have lesser low low charged antennas then we have lesser maintenance visits which are the site visits. The pooling of hardware and the and the software at the same time what result into better management of traffic. Say for example splitting of traffic between the residential areas and the business hubs and then correspondingly the traffic would also be off loaded from one particular antenna to the other. So the ultimate advantage is that we are going to have a centralized management activity this even includes centralized software updates and maintenance. The scalability is also going to be enhanced because if once we had the local ran availability it resulted into stringent traffic steering requirements. Now we'll have better load balancing so we can think about off loading cluttered or overly loaded antenna. This will improve the handovers better connection establishment low call failure low handover failure probabilities and then the overall signaling between the core network elements. And the onsite elements is also going to reduce this will result into overall more time for sparing to transmit and receive data. Mechanisms such as the centralized coordinated multipoint transmission which is a smart way to handle traffic for multiple destinations through a centralized mechanism can also be realized. This concept cloud ran is from Sepo Hamilton's book on LTE self organizing networks. I've been referring to it lately and then there is Ericsson cloud ran as well. You might like to have a look at it as well. And then from the Selona network providers. You might like to have a look at how they look at cloud ran.