It may be tough for vendors and operators to convert complex 5G technologies to a pure open source model, but that doesn’t mean the open source giants are not having a significant influence on 5G platforms and processes. The Linux Foundation has, over the past several years, established or hosted a growing number of projects that impact directly on telecoms networks, including the LF Networking umbrella super-group of projects.
Earlier this month, the Foundation announced that it plans to launch an industry collaboration to enable an open source converged cellular core network stack. Its starting point will be an existing platform, Magma, which was developed by Facebook and open sourced in 2019. It will now be managed under a neutral governance framework at the Linux Foundation.
The founding members of the new group are Facebook itself, with ARM, Deutsche Telekom, FreedomFi and Qualcomm, plus three open initiatives – the Institute of Wireless IoT at the USA’s Northeastern University, the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance, and the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF).
Magma centers on an access-agnostic mobile packet core, together with network automation and management tools. It can use virtual or container network functions (xNFs), to support convergence across fixed or mobile 4G or 5G and carrier WiFi, to support mobile broadband, fixed wireless access, private cellular and network expansion use cases, in the first instance.
It is particularly geared to the integration of cellular networking with edge computing to support enterprise applications as well as improve the latency and reliability of telcos’ consumer applications, such as cloud gaming. As such it is designed to work with, and complement, open source LF-hosted projects in adjacent areas such as management and orchestration (ONAP) and mobile edge compute (Akraino).
Of course, this raises the issue of how Magma will fit alongside other open core initiatives such as Open Networking Foundation’s OMEC and CORD, or Telecom Infra Project (TIP)’s Open Core Network group.
The latter has already said it will cooperate with Linux Foundation to define, build, test and deploy core network products that leverage Magma software.
Meanwhile, Magma is working with the OIF, even though that has often been portrayed as something of a rival to Linux Foundation. Arpit Joshipura, the Linux Foundation’s general manager for networking, edge and IoT, said: “Magma has gotten great community support from several ecosystem players and foundations including OIF, OAI etc. What we are announcing today is the next evolution of the project where the actual hosting of the project is being set up under the Linux Foundation with neutral governance that has been accepted by the community for a long time. OIF, OAI, and LF will work with their communities of software developers to contribute to Magma’s core project.”
The Foundation said that Magma aims to make it easier and cheaper for operators, traditional and new-entrant, to:
- expand capacity and coverage using a combination of LTE, 5G, WiFi and (in the USA) CBRS
- avoid vendor lock-in for their mobile cores
- manage networks with high automation to reduce downtime, improve predictability, and enhance agility to add new services and applications
- enable federation between existing MNOs and new infrastructure providers to augment mobile networks more efficiently
support present and future 5G use cases such as private 5G, integrated access/backhaul (IAB), augmented networks and non-terrestrial networks.
FreedomFi has built more than 20 private LTE networks based on the Magma platform. Its CEO, Boris Renski, foresees Magma “turning into what we believe is quickly becoming the Linux of the telecom network cores … With industry giants like ARM and Qualcomm joining the effort and helping ensure compatibility of Magma with their platforms, we expect that other RAN and OSS vendors will rally around the effort to help further accelerate adoption.”
Renski, who was a co-founder of cloud infrastructure firm Mirantis, says that, rather than banning Huawei kit, it is more important to open up the ecosystem. In his ‘manifesto’ when he launched FreedomFi a year ago, he wrote: “The price of an entry ticket to build a cellular network just changed from ‘millions of dollars and years of FCC paperwork’ to ‘zero dollars and a single API call’.”
He believes shared spectrum and open source technology will break “the oligopoly of a few large players” and finally introduce the open cloud economics, which Mirantis helped push within OpenStack, to telecoms.
FreedomFi is targeting private LTE networks in the USA using the general access portion of the CBRS band and open source software.