Telecommunications companies (telcos) are well on their way to transforming their infrastructure from the legacy, unadaptable, complex network of dedicated hardware from yesteryears to agile, modular and scalable software-defined systems running on common off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.

Within this space, the current trend, driven by 5G deployments, is to complement tried and tested network function virtualisation (NFV) infrastructure with cloud-native network functions (CNFs). This refers to the cloud-native approach of building, deploying and managing telco functions and applications as a mesh of micro services packaged as containers.

A telco cloud is a highly robust and dynamic infrastructure built using cloud-native technologies designed specifically for communication services providers (CSPs) to deliver agile, flexible and efficient telecom services. It combines various components like software-defined networking (SDN), orchestration tools and other cloud computing technologies to enable the creation, customisation, and management of network services in a more cost-effective, scalable, and automated manner compared to traditional telecom architectures. It empowers telcos to reduce their innovations’ time to market, to react more quickly to shifts in network requirements and to improve their operational efficiency. A telco cloud provides the foundation for next-generation communication services, including 5G stand-alone (5G SA) networks and various Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

How does a telco cloud address telco challenges?

In order to stay innovative and competitive, telcos need ever more agility. They need to respond quickly to shifting market dynamics, evolving customer demands and emerging technologies. They require flexibility, modularity and freedom to customise solutions to keep up with the evolution of the industry. These are all areas in which a telco cloud can help.

Innovate and customise

With cloud-native application development techniques, telcos can leverage a telco cloud to bring new 5G revenue streams, internally developed or externally acquired from new tech and start-ups with a higher risk appetite than service providers.

They can reduce the time to develop, build and deploy new services and features to specific customer segments. This enables bringing solutions targeting new markets, such as industry monitoring, smart cities, smart homes, connected cars and fleet management.

These solutions can be tailored to specific customers quickly and economically thanks to the agility, modularity and flexibility of cloud-native software development.

Similarly, these technologies allow telcos to build platforms which can ignite collaboration and provide support to innovative third party developers. This can enable the creation of value in the telco’s core competencies, including connectivity and operational excellence, while reducing risks associated with the process of experimentation.

Increase power efficiency

Energy expenses currently comprise between 15% and 40% of telcos’ operating costs. They are all actively looking for ways to reduce their energy consumption through energy-efficient technology, renewable energy sources, and improved operational efficiency.

By virtualizing network functions and consolidating multiple workloads on a shared infrastructure, a telco cloud reduces the overall number of physical servers and corresponding power requirements. With intelligent load-balancing techniques, a telco cloud ensures optimal resource utilisation across the network, minimising idle resources and reducing the need for excess capacity, which in turn decreases power consumption. 

The use of specific analytics coupled with automation can be beneficial to optimise the power consumption of telco workloads. Underutilised wasteful infrastructure can be identified and massive power savings can be achieved with the right optimisation approach while maintaining network performance and service levels. A telco cloud offers the flexibility to scale resources up or down according to demand, ensuring that only the necessary compute, storage and network capacity is being used. The high availability and fault tolerance features of a telco cloud ensure minimal downtime and prevent overloading of resources, thereby optimising energy consumption by reducing the need for redundant equipment or backup systems.

Improve customer loyalty

Telcos are facing heightened competition and shifting consumer behaviours, necessitating creative approaches to increase revenue and maintain customer expansion. One way is to bundle and aggregate popular streaming services by partnering with content platforms.

A telco cloud enables the integration – from delivery to billing – of various digital services, such as over-the-top (OTT) media content distribution, to significantly enhance the telco customer experience. 

Using AI-powered tools, telcos are also able to grow their revenues by predicting and preventing subscriber churn. A telco cloud delivers more agile cloud-centric monetisation platforms providing more insights to power the new generation of services.

Reduce costs

A telco cloud, when run at scale, reduces the capital expenditure required to support network infrastructure by enabling companies to utilise COTS hardware and pay only for the capacity they need, adjusting with usage changes, while leveraging the hybrid cloud.

This shift to operational expenditure is covered by the accompanying process automation enabled by Telco Cloud best practices and cloud-native application development methodologies, such as DevSecOps and CI/CD.

The highly resilient and automated architecture of the Telco Cloud also improves service availability and reduces the time to respond to faults and demand fluctuations.

What are the technical requirements for a telco cloud?

There are significant differences between your general purpose cloud environment and that of a telco cloud. With the exception of mission-critical applications, enterprise cloud deployments can tolerate less tight availability and performance requirements than those of telco network functions.

Some functions, such as the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), need to perform in real-time at the edge of the network, as close to the user equipment as possible, with the best throughput and latency. The five nines availability goal, a downtime of no more than 5.26 minutes per year, is also a given.

A telco cloud encompasses not only the telco central offices and edge locations, but also data centres spread across the network reach. It delivers its network functions and other workloads wherever they can be run in order to optimise efficiency and quality of experience.

Carrier-grade network requirements initially prevented moving network functions to the public cloud. With the improvement of multi cloud and hybrid cloud connectivity, more and more telcos are leveraging public cloud infrastructure for some of their telco cloud network functions. One significant advantage of the container technology used in cloud-native architecture is its portability. The microservices realising a network function and its dependencies are encapsulated in a single, self-contained unit that can run on any system that supports the container format.

One of the key conditions in achieving a successful implementation of a telco cloud is the need for business continuity and coexistence of cloud-native with existing legacy infrastructure. During a telco cloud deployment, companies need to be able to seamlessly migrate existing network services and applications in a coordinated manner. A good way to approach this challenge is to consider not only the infrastructure and product portfolio but also the organisation and its processes.

As with any project, there are several factors to evaluate when deploying a telco cloud:

• Whether to buy a complete solution or to do everything or part of it internally, with or without external support from a systems integrator.
• What amount should be invested upfront?
• How much risk is acceptable?
• What is the target time-to-market?
• How will success be defined and measured?

Some of the key decisions that telcos need to make include:

• Identifying the telco cloud services that need to redeveloped as microservices instead of migrated virtual machines (VMs).
• Selecting the right management and orchestration tools to support the efficient and effective automation of a telco cloud.
• Defining the rules that drive the hybrid cloud approach, depending on the economics, operational expertise and time-to-market requirements.
• Partnering and collaborating with technology companies, startups, and other organisations. This can help to access new technologies, markets, and expertise, and accelerate time-to-market

The path to a successful telco cloud deployment can be long and difficult but it is one of the key milestones for a telco to achieve its transition into a “techco” (technology-driven company) equipped to face competition from tech giants, media conglomerates and startups.

How can Canonical help you deploy a telco cloud?

In order to deploy a telco cloud effectively, companies need the tools that can support all their critical workloads wherever they run them, and enable them to incorporate innovators into the CSP network.

Canonical brings the power of open source cloud-native technologies to  the telco industry. A member of key telecommunications initiatives (such as the Open Networking Foundation, where we contribute to the Aether project, the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance, the Sylva project, and ETSI), Canonical provides cloud platforms that support the deployment and operation of certified virtual and container network functions both for the 5G Core and RAN. We are a proven, trusted technology partner in the ecosystem, with years of experience in telco operations across the globe.

Canonical maintains a strong security posture by ensuring all published open source software is hardened, audited and certified to adhere to industry standards. This commitment extends to reducing the footprint of the OS and containers to minimise the attack surface.

This specific innovation also translates into efficiency gains that are significant in large-scale RAN deployments involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of nodes.

Furthermore, Canonical’s robust automation tooling and 12 years long term support (LTS) not only streamline day 2 operations but also contribute to a competitive TCO making canonical the most economical vendor in the market.

Global top-tier operators endorse Canonical solutions for telcos. Our solutions encompass core, RAN and edge use cases and provide essential Enhanced Platform Awareness capabilities such as affinity and anti-affinity rules, CPU pinning, DPDK, Huge Pages, SR-IOV and secondary vNIC access, among others.

Groundwork starts with our tight partnerships with silicon vendors and independent hardware vendors that ensure Canonical provides the best silicon enablement and support for innovative technologies and acceleration capabilities.

Lastly, Canonical’s simple and unique Ubuntu Pro subscription offers the most comprehensive long term support, security and compliance for all your open source software. Using Canonical solutions, companies can operate carrier-grade cloud-native Telco Clouds at scale.

Learn more about Canonical solutions for telcos

Carrier-grade open source for telecommunications

Transform your infrastructure with secure and cloud-native telecom solutions

Further reading

Reduce 5G infrastructure costs with open source

How telcos are building carrier-grade infrastructure using open source

How a real-time kernel reduces latency in telco edge clouds

RAN has incrementally evolved with every generation of mobile telecommunications, thus enabling faster data transfers between user devices and core networks. The amount of data has increased more than ever with an increase in the number of interlinked devices. With existing network architectures, challenges lie in handling increasing workloads with the ability to process, analyse and transfer data faster.   The 5G ecosystem requires virtual implementations of RAN. Fifth-generation mobile networks demand more flexibility to adapt, scalability to meet network conditions on run time, and automation for remote management which could only be delivered through virtualised RAN.  

Intel FlexRAN addresses the challenges of traditional RAN architectures. It has the ability to abstract the underlying hardware from core network functions for optimal resource utilisation. FlexRAN is an enhancement and reference implementation of O-RAN (OpenRAN) with the flexibility of interoperation between different vendors’ equipment. Support for EPA (Enhanced Platform Awareness) features empowers Intel FlexRAN to optimally run on Linux distributions. Canonical’s Ubuntu real-time kernel support and Intel’s FlexRAN both complement each other to enable telcos and mobile operators to scale resources as per needs and benefit from cost-savings.  Watch a detailed webinar here.

Canonical’s Real-time kernel for Intel FlexRAN

Canonical is delivering optimised, secure, and efficient server images for telecommunication workloads and enabling 5G adoption by providing real-time kernel support in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Real-time kernel delivers optimal performance and low latency for network sensitive workloads and security features. It enables thread scheduling by pinning cores to processes. It isolates and dedicates the cores to both host and applications for optimal resource utilisation.

Intel and Canonical contributed efforts to deliver scalable and reliable Intel FlexRAN reference RAN software with Ubuntu real-time kernel and Canonical strictly confined MicroK8s . Strict confinement uses the security features of the Linux kernel, including AppArmor, seccomp, and namespaces to prevent applications and services from accessing the wider system. FlexRAN comprises a control plane and agent API. Agent API separates the control plane from the data plane. Hence, separation provides a cost-efficient and reliable RAN environment.    

Demo: Real-time auto-scaling of vDU in 5G RAN network

Canonical and Intel, jointly performed the auto-scaling of 5G RAN components, i.e vDU, and demonstrated that in MWC, Las Vegas 2022. The test setup comprises Canonical’s MicroK8s cluster enabled with Ubuntu real-time kernel, Intel FlexRAN, and Intel accelerators.

In this demo, RAN components are deployed in microservices architecture on Canonical’s MicroK8s cluster. The example here represents a real life scenario of a stadium with high bandwidth demands for autoscaling resources. Under normal circumstances, 5G entertains requests including file transfers, messages and general communications. Bandwidth utilisation is reasonable with guaranteed SLAs. Contrarily, in case of massive events, 5G needs to serve requests for applications including Virtual Reality (VR), live streaming, online sharing, high-quality streaming that requires higher bandwidths.  

The figure below represents the proposed high level architecture for how  FlexRAN’s components are running on top of Ubuntu with a real-time kernel. Trex traffic generator is deployed in one MicroK8s  cluster, Intel FlexRAN is deployed on another MicroK8s and RAN  Intelligent Controller is deployed on a native Kubernetes cluster. Intel FlexRAN’s microservice governance continuously collects vDU telemetry metrics via O1 agent. Thus, ensuring the SLA with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities under high concurrent and dynamic workloads.

DU functional block comprises two microservices; first DU CP and second DU UP. Microservices enable flexibility to scale DU compared to traditional deployment models. In the figure below, three network slices were deployed hosting two UEs each with different scheduling priorities. Slice 1 – GBR0 with higher priority, slice 2 – GBR1 with medium, and slice 3 – Background UEs with the least priority. A traffic generator is used to increase traffic to a certain threshold.

The DU-UP pod reports cell utilisation metrics to RIC via O1 agent. RIC is a software-defined component providing advanced control functionality with efficient radio resource management using AI/ML capabilities.  When the network load increases above the threshold, SMO sends a signal to the Intel FlexRAN microservice governance pod to horizontally scale out vDU. As a result, slice 1 is migrated to the newly deployed DU-UP pod to ensure SLA and QoS and when the network load decreases, Cell # 2 is deleted.  The runtime monitoring of metrics has also been recorded to ensure intelligent decisions based on the traffic situation.

 

Watch the full demo recording from MWC Las Vegas, 2022 following a high-traffic scenario in a public event and understand how the user traffic has been shifted from one DU to the newly created DU cell site in real-time and what is the role of RIC in this autoscaling of RAN components.

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