Building a cloud native converged mobile core

Voice&Data along with Mavenir recently organised a webinar on Building a cloud native converged mobile core. The pandemic has seen many unprecedented changes across the enterprise. The biggest winner has been the cloud. Telecom sector has emerged as the backbone of the new digital normal.

Sudhansu Dora, Chief Technology Officer, Mavenir, India and South Asia, spoke about India's mobile economy and 5G vision. There are three visions for India: deployment, technology, and manufacturing. The Indian government and policy makers support the 5G vision. The 5G High-Level Forum articulates that 5G has the potential for ushering a major societal transformation in India by a rapid expansion of the role of IT across manufacturing, education, healthcare, agriculture, financial and social sectors.

India's mobile subscription penetration will cross 100% in 2023, driven by the growing smartphone adoption. LTE connections are forecast to reach 820 million by 2026, accounting for 63% of mobile subscriptions. 5G will represent around 27% of mobile subscriptions in India at the end of 2026, estimated at about 350 million subscriptions.

There are business and operational challenges. These are risk of outage and speed of recovery, high capex/opex, agile service deployment, and impact on customer experience. Operators will need a customizable network, better performance, decoupled architecture, web-scale cloud native infrastructure, service velocity, and automation and CI/CD.

Network slicing provides the ability to customize the network based on customer needs. It provides traffic isolation and security. Better performance leads to improved latency, higher throughput, and scalability. Decoupled networks allow the apps to be placed closer to the edge, achieving low latency and high throughput.

Containerized cloud-native infrastructure with open-source components enables faster deployment and lower overheads. Service velocity helps launch new services at rapid speed and stay agile when it comes to service deployment. Finally, use of automation, driven by AI/ML, brings operational efficiency. CI/CD eliminates the human error without downtime, leading to workforce reduction.

Being cloud-native

Dejan Leskaroski, Head of Product Management, Mavenir, cloud native has been overused in the telecom industry. He talked about the challenges and opportunities. There are early benefits of 5G and changing mobile networks. 5G is a service-based architecture. It is function based and uses a single communication protocol. Control and user plane is mandatory, with native CUPS architecture. There is a highly distributed and dynamic topology. 5G is also sliced for many use cases, and highly scalable.

Dejan Leskaroski, Head of Product Management, Mavenir

The operators' desire agile service deployment, scale current footprint, offer enterprise services, reduce capex and opex, and provide on-demand deployment. Mavenir's solution offers a cloud-native architecture, 4G/5G combo nodes, small footprint NPN, has containers on COTS hardware, has an automation framework and CI/CD, and offers network-as-a-service. 5G core architecture is designed to support a web-scale architecture with CI/CD.

There are emerging opportunities for new 5G revenue. Different 5G use cases require different types of network with varying attributes and performances. Such diversity in networks can only be supported by a 5G core standalone network. The opportunities exist in enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), which is high volume, high capacity and seamless. Next is massive machine-type communications (mMTC), where there can be a massive number of devices and types, low cost/power, and deep coverage. Another is ulta-reliable low latency communications (URLLC), with ultra-high reliability, low latency, and precise positioning.

Operators can create specialized networks to reach different customers. Network slicing is a key enabler. Eg., slice 1 can be URLLC, slice 2 can be eMTC, and slice 3 can be eMBB. With 5G network slicing, they can provide dedicated packet cores.

Mavenir has specific 4G and 5G solutions for consumer, cloud IoT, MEC, NPN, etc. For 5G non-public network (NPN) and multi-access edge computing (MEC) use cases, there is industrial IoT, with industrial automation, healthcare, V2X, etc. There are also use cases of in-stream video analytics, such as AR/VR rendering. MEC apps like face recognition software, video analytics software, etc., should be co-located with 5G user plane function UPF. There are 'area of interest' use cases, as well.

Mavenir also offers the converged packet core. There are four pillars of cloud-native solutions. These are service-based architectures, containers, continuous delivery, and devops. The architecture is independent and loosely-coupled components (microservices). Containers serve as packaging infrastructure. Continuous delivery involves standard process, systems, skills and tools. Devops is the strong collaboration between developers and IT operations.

What is the need to push for 100% cloud native solutions? There are distributed microservices, resiliency, portability, agility, automation, scalability, and availability. There is unified operation, management and dimensioning, with fastest deployment and minimal footprint. Mavenir offers the end-to-end converged core product portfolio. It includes the converged packet core, subscriber and data management, and policy and charging. There is the Mavenir web-scale platform (MWP) for container deployment, and the Mavenir telco cloud integration layer (MTCIL).

Mavenir technology is enabling key tenets of 5G strategy. These include:

Multi-cloud and multi-platform: Mavenir converged packet core is built on the open source platform allowing for agnostic cloud deployment. The 5GC can be deployed on VMware Tanzu, OpenShift, AWS, and Mavenir Web-scale platform (MWP).

100% cloud native: End-to-end fully containerized 5G, 4G, and 3G/2G converged packet core developed on microservices and 100% cloud native.

One scalable core for all use cases: Mavenir converged packet core is a single, scalable software, natively supporting all-dimension use cases.

Automation, AI/ML and analytics: The framework supports SLA-driven slicing, OTT analytics, pre-emptive KPI monitoring, AI-driven anomaly detection and remediation.

Enabling advanced technology: Mavenir is engaged with multiple fronts and partner collaborations when it comes to spearheading the 5G tech innovation. These include areas in advanced edge, AI/ML, smartNIC and private network (NPN) driven use cases.

Mavenir has 4 R&D centers in India. Around 60% of the employees are dedicated to R&D. It partners with local manufacturers for remote radio unit or RRU manufacturing. Mavenir packet core products fall under the Make in India policy.