One of the areas where the Open RAN community hopes to steal a march on more established RAN architectures is in cloud-native, containerized networks. While the incumbent vendors and platforms can boast their many years of expertise in high performance radios, on the long road to cloud-native RAN, there is a far more level playing field.
For the RAN vendors, it has therefore become highly strategic to find strong partners in network cloud management and operations, focused on container management. Rakuten and Parallel Wireless have worked with Robin.io in this area, while Mavenir has just announced a partnership with Platform9 for its Managed Kubernetes (PMK) system.
Mavenir has integrated its own Webscale Platform, which is based on Kubernetes, on top of PMK, to support Open RAN and other telco workloads. The Mavenir offering, announced in January, adds telco-specific functions to an IT platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The vendor contributed its telco extensions to the Linux Foundation’s Opensource XGVela project.
The addition of Platform9’s capabilities enhances Mavenir’s ability to manage containerized deployments of its vRAN software, going beyond the vanilla capabilities of the Kubernetes system.
It addresses one of the critical requirements for cloud-native RANs – to automate the management and orchestration of containers-based software, in scenarios where there may be cloud-native functions from multiple suppliers, being deployed in large numbers to highly distributed locations, and scaled up and down rapidly in response to changing traffic demands. As with other aspects of the open RAN architectures, this often requires performance that is not fully supported by IT container systems.
Bejoy Pankajakshan, chief strategy officer at Mavenir, said of the XGVela project, talking to SDxCentral: “We enable in any cloud deployment model by having this telco-enabled PaaS on top of standard containers-as-a-service and PaaS, which then allows you to meet the telco-specific requirements …. If you take a standard distribution of Kubernetes [such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service] you don’t get these capabilities.”
Mavenir’s Webscale Platform provides a layer that operators can deploy with their chosen cloud platforms, whether a private telco cloud or a public cloud, and whether in the central data center or at the edge. It is currently being trialled by one of India’s tier 1 MNOs. The vendor has also developed an AI-enabled analytics platform that will include the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), network function data analytics, and AIOps.
Later this year, it will introduce an offering, developed with Nvidia and Mellanox, to help operators deploy packet core functionality at the edge of the network, together with software tools for 5G/edge applications in areas such as industrial automation, and AR/VR.
A year ago, Rakuten Mobile talked about the critical role of a telco-centric container management solution for moving towards a cloud-native RAN. Its vRAN software supplier, Altiostar, had recently formed an alliance with Robin.io in order to containerize its RAN software and allow the vRAN to be broken into smaller, mix-and-match components that allow the network to scale up and down, and modify its behavior, in a dynamic fashion to meet different user demands.
In this process, it is important that RAN specialists find partners with strong track record in containers, orchestration and lifecycle management – disciplines which are far more mature in the IT world than in telecoms networks. Robin.io is already working with Parallel Wireless, which is releasing Robin.io versions of its Unified OpenRAN Controller software and Unified Edge Core software.
Parallel says it is seeking to provide RAN software and orchestration in a single package, bringing together its multi-radio RAN solution, All G OpenRAN, with Robin.io’s data center application automation platform, which is built on Kubernetes.
This offering will be well-placed for the 5G era – in which many elements from small cells to edge data centers will have to be managed dynamically – argue the vendors, because a single system will be able to manage radio heads, baseband units, servers, towers and on-premises enterprise equipment. This will enable data center automation processes to support instant provisioning of complex suites of virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native functions (CNFs), together with self-optimization and self-healing for the RAN.
“It’s clear with the global open RAN movement that the RAN will soon be completely software-defined and implemented using cloud-native design patterns,” said Parallel’s co-founder and CEO Steve Papa, who also sits on the advisory board of Robin.io. “Operators also need a platform that can provide end-to-end slicing of these heterogeneous resources.”
At the same time, Mavenir announced its first public triallist for its cloud-native Open RAN solution. This was Turkcell, which has deployed the containerized central unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU) elements on its own telco cloud and edge cloud.