CableLabs, the R&D arm of the US cable industry, presented a few updates on the group’s Adrenaline virtualization project during day one of the virtual Cable Next-Gen Europe event last week. Adrenaline is described as a modern computing architecture that supports centrally managed deployments of fixed, mobile and edge workloads on a common accelerated distributed infrastructure.
CableLabs’ CTO Belal Hamzeh said: “Today we look at the HFC network as a connectivity platform, to carry data from point A to point B. For us to evolve and support emerging applications, a different perspective is required, we need to start looking at the HFC network as a connectivity and compute platform.”
He added: “We see virtualization as a huge enabler for such a transformation. But how do we get there? Today we think of virtualization as servers running X86 or ARM processors, but we are expanding the scope of virtualization on accelerated hardware – expanding to FPGAs, DSPs, CPUs and GPUs to create a heterogeneous architecture.”
This allows for offload of functions to GPUs or smart network interface cards (Smart NICs), with common orchestration and control for all communications and edge workloads. With this new architecture, the whole network can be transformed into a distributed, heterogenous compute platform catering for dynamic workload allocation to optimize how a network is running.
Time, space and power are all critical for communications and edge deployments – with limited space and power for each location. CableLabs has identified that certain applications and functionalities can be much more efficient running on an accelerator versus running on a typical CPU – meaning an operator can start running multiple instances of functionalities across various points in the network.
“For example, if running a remote MAC-PHY, where both the MAC and PHY have to run in the node, you can run multiple instances across the network. So the same network might be running a centralized architecture where you put your PHY, MAC and core in the head-end, at the same time running in parallel a remote MAC-PHY instance, by pushing both the MAC and the PHY workload down to the node. This basically enables a huge amount of flexibility in how you manage and run your network,” he said.
CableLabs has been working closely with US engineering specialist Altran on the Adrenaline project, which is initially focused on cable, but has the broader objective of applying its developments to multiple industries including 5G.
Adrenaline has its focus in the right place. It aims to accelerate work in the emerging virtualized converged cable access platform (vCCAP) core. But it is also making efforts to virtualize mobile cores too, especially as about half of CableLabs’ members are also MNOs. The aim of Adrenaline is to simplify the way that new applications are deployed.
Adrenaline is tipped as providing an open source foundation to enable such a transformation. “This is already scaled out and deployed in open source. Adrenaline can support HFC networks with typical X86 or ARM-based virtualization, and then you can start adding acceleration on a need basis, so there is no must to deploy now. My expectation is that applications will be the driver behind this and the network will be ready. The timeline is still to be worked out with where we are today dealing with Covid-19, so priorities are different,” added Hamzeh.