The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 15, 2026
Filed:
Feb. 07, 2024
Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc, Redmond, WA (US);
Anuj Kalia, San Francisco, CA (US);
Xenofon Foukas, Cambridge, GB;
Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
A distributed unit (DU) in a virtual radio access network (vRAN) of a wireless 5G (fifth generation) network is implemented using software-defined networking (SDN) technology on a single computer server that is physically co-located with a radio unit in a distributed RAN (D-RAN) architecture. An update agent facilitates versioning support through interoperations with different DU versions, v1 and v2, to prevent them from concurrently executing real-time processing threads on the server's processor which would cause malfunctions. DU v2 is initialized using non-real-time threads. The update agent blocks real-time processing thread generation by DU v2 after initialization is complete. The update agent sets DU v1 processing threads to non-real-time and unblocks DU v2 to migrate data traffic between the versions. A layer 2 switch provides duplicated data packets to virtual network interface cards that are implemented for the respective DU versions and which share a common MAC (medium access control) address.