Going Towards the EdgeRAN5G with cloud platforms (Virtual Machines And Containers)
Sat, 26 Jun 2021 15:58:44, atika, [category: 5g-community]
Disaggregated Mobile Network Radio Base Station
In the first diagram, there is the division RU, DU, and CU by 3GPP and running on their own environment having an interface between them. And they are all pretty much all single vendor 5G radio deployment so far with no Open Interfaces, that is the upper model here. The second model is to apply O-RAN Open front hall and 3GPP F1 interface then we can call that an Open RAN, of course, there are tons of other interfaces O-RAN alliance is specifying but these are the main tools between the radio workflows.
In the upper part of the figure below, there is vRAN virtualized RAN, and as you can see the random workloads are not having open interfaces in this model but applying DU and CU sites are applying a cloud platform which can be virtualized platform, virtualization platform or container platform either way. And today there tends to be more and more container platforms on bare metal and virtual virtualization platforms. It is called vRAN because this is still from a radio workload point of view it’s still a single vendor thing because there are no open interfaces between the entities but it’s virtualized or DU and CU virtualized. The second diagram is a combination of the previous and it is called Open vRAN. Open vRAN in that diagram is having open interfaces between the workloads and open interfaces within CU and DU.
Hight Level RAN Stack by O-RAN Alliance
To show the complex theme of the O-RAN, this is one of the O-RAN diagrams.
RAN Evolution Adds New Requirements to Cloud Platform
There are 3 of the most important new areas to cover.
- Realtime Kernel (RT), Workloads stringent low-latency determinism requirements for core kernel features such as interrupt handling and process scheduling in the microsecond (μs) range.
- Timing and Synchronization, Timing synchronization via transport networks will be critical for 5G radios. Precision Time Protocol (PTP) remains the preferred method to deliver timing across packet-switched networks.
- Hardware Acceleration, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), SmartNIC, and other hardware acceleration components will be vital for 5G virtualized infrastructure.
There are tons of other requirements which are put on cloud platforms when we compare what a cloud platform has to do in central data centers.
OpenShift Deployments
These are the models in our Kubernetes platform called open shift that are the model’s deployment model we need to support for brand use cases and other edge use cases as well and those are shown on the left-hand side.
