Operator collaborated with Nokia and AWS to validate 5G Cloud RAN’s performance, scalability and operational efficiency – work is ongoing
Telefónica announced the successful completion of Europe’s first 5G Standalone (SA) call via on-premises and public cloud architecture. It was achieved with Nokia’s Cloud RAN solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. Telefónica is collaborating with Nokia and AWS to bring the benefits of the cloud to 5G RAN.
Telefónica is running Nokia’s RAN Distributed Unit (DU) software in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance powered by Graviton, an Arm-based CPU from AWS. Telefónica will work with AWS to validate AWS Outposts servers based on Graviton 3 CPU for on-premises deployment at RAN sites.
Due to the portability of the containerised network function software from Nokia, the RAN Centralised Unit (CU) is running on an Amazon EC2 instance in the AWS Spain Region, located in Aragón. This allows the radio network to be deployed across a cloud architecture spanning on-premises as well as public cloud locations covering hundreds of kilometers.
Ongoing explorations
The companies will continue to work on the operational benefits of the cloud-based solution such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) combined with Nokia’s 5G network capabilities. The companies will also investigate new cloud technologies to reduce operational complexity and enhance network assurance.
Using AWS and Nokia management and observability solutions, Telefónica will examine how to simplify the network configuration and lifecycle maintenance with common automation and observability across the network stack.
This hybrid architecture delivers low-latency and high bandwidth for real-time Nokia RAN workloads running on AWS cloud services that offer on-demand elastic cloud infrastructure, along with security, unified APIs, observability, and resiliency enabled on Telefónica premises.
Different locations via APIs
As AWS is delivering the same set of APIs, services, observability, and resilience it gives Telefónica the flexibility to place workloads at different locations based on the latency requirements of the underlying transport infrastructure.
The cloud architecture allows Telefónica to have a common CI/CD pipeline to ease the operational burden, reduce integration costs and maximise “feature velocity across these different locations extending all the way to the edge of the network reaching the RAN sites”.
RAN: the final frontier
José Luis Esplá, Director of Access & Devices at Telefónica, said, “RAN represents the final frontier for cloudification and the most critical workload for our mobile networks. Exploring the AWS cloud provides an opportunity to evolve 5G networks to achieve more flexibility and programmability by simplifying our network assets. By collaborating with thought leaders like AWS and Nokia in this domain, our goal is to validate the hybrid cloud infrastructure.”
Amir Rao, Director for Telco 5G at AWS, said: “We’re demonstrating how AWS’ cloud infrastructure can support the demanding requirements of 5G RAN workloads. This collaboration showcases how AWS’ comprehensive suite of cloud services, from on-premises edge computing to regional data centers, can support the full spectrum of RAN operations.”
Aji Ed, Head of Cloud RAN at Nokia, said: “Nokia is helping its customers on their cloudification journey by leading the fusion of AI, RAN, and Cloud which is helping to drive innovation and new business models supporting monetization.”
