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Discriminating among legacy non-virtualized sites, C-RAN, vRAN, and O-RAN is essential for understanding their architectural and operational differences. Legacy non-virtualized sites are characterized by monolithic, vendor-locked hardware with tightly integrated baseband and radio units. C-RAN can be identified by centralized baseband pooling and high-capacity fronthaul links, while still relying on mostly proprietary interfaces. vRAN is distinguished by virtualized baseband functions running on general-purpose hardware with software-defined control and elastic resource allocation. O-RAN is further discriminated by its open and standardized interfaces, disaggregated functional blocks, and the presence of RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs), enabling multi-vendor interoperability and data-driven optimization. |
IEEE/ICACT20260367 Slide.03
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