Thursday School : One CaaS to Rule Them All! RAN is widely noted to be the last application to be virtualised in a typical Mobile Network. The fact that this virtualisation is often in tandem with OpenRAN seems to have led some commentators to think that vRAN is a ‘special child’ and must be on a special CaaS (Containerisation as a Service, the middleware that the vRAN applications vCU, vDU and vRIC sit in). It’s not. Now operational and commercial niceties – putting Accelerator cards into vRAN servers for 1 example, and the Core and RAN teams choosing their vendors at times of their choosing as another example – often lead operators to use different CaaS. Vodafone UK, for example uses Dell Servers with VMware TCP for their core, and they use Dell Servers with Wind River Studio for their Open vRAN. Both VMware TCP (with a couple of extra SW modules for TCP-RAN) and Wind River Studio can both Containerise ALL applications in a network. So handle RAN CU&DU and terminate user plane in UPF right in the same server, perhaps even video analytics and EdgeCDN/EdgeADN in the same infrastructure. So while Vodafone uses Wind River Studio in their Open vRAN, and Elisa uses it for their Edge UPF deployment (Elisa’s UPF application enables local breakout to regional services, including enterprises that need fast, secure, and low-latency access to their own local Data Centres) it’s the same CaaS in both cases, and ideally one would do both, on the same infra in the same Edge DCs for fantastically low latency! #EveryDaysaSchoolDay #Telecommunications #CaaS Previous Post : https://lnkd.in/emHCgPF7
Ian Goetz
9mo
As we’ve discussed, many factors come to play. When deploying a distributed DU at thousands of cell sites or even DU/CU in thousands of edge clouds - efficiency comes in to play - cores/server for the CaaS, servers needed per config for a given RAN vendor and then an choice of efficient CPU. You can run the CU, Near-RT RIC, x.Apps and the UPF and N6 Firewall on the same CaaS in the edge cloud … but even that relies on the move to 5G SA…. Otherwise with 4G & NSA it’s ETSI MEC “bump in the wire” for edge low latency services and we know how much the core teams like that…..
Sherif Sedkey
9mo
Thanks Paul Rhodes as always very informative. I think that CSPs need to change the traditional approach and silos. if you want to transform Cloud architecture and benefit from it then plan and act with cloud mindset ie design and select and deploy a horizontal cloud infrastructure and CaaS then ask NF vendors to deploy on top of it
Builder and Consultant on Open vRAN, Small Cell and EdgeAI Networks
9moAs I shared 2 weeks ago, while we've not yet hit 'plug-and-play' levels, and some SW is more resource-friendly than others, the blue boxes below represent 'Infrastructure' (Compute, storage, networking and CaaS) and the functions - services in future - moving from one stack to another represents that 'infra-agnostic' fungibility.