The adoption of open radio access networks (RAN) disaggregated network architectures brings new benefits and challenges to communication service providers (CSPs) deploying these new models. Evolving from closed appliance RAN implementations, disaggregation helps operators move to a software-based solution that is more flexible and scalable. The disaggregated RAN decouples soft- ware from hardware components, and the deployments are broken down into functional elements: radio unit (RU), distributed unit (DU), and central unit (CU). Operators can locate functions inde- pendently, where needed, to adapt to the changing demands on their networks while optimizing the deployment and management costs.

Beyond 3GPP standard disaggregation, the open-RAN (O-RAN) Alliance promotes the cloudifi- cation of the RAN software, and with it, the adoption of containerized networking functions (CNF). Kubernetes is the preferred container orchestration platform for RAN workloads adopting this transformation.