The wireless data traffic explosion on the network has caused service providers to re-evaluate their existing network infrastructure. This traditional Central Office infrastructure built with closed proprietary boxes has proven to be too rigid, limited by existing hardware investment and available spectrum.
A progressive open source project of the ONOS partnership – CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) – delivers a powerful new approach to transform service providers’ Central Offices into telco optimized data centers. This approach is being driven by two key tenets:
- Economies of a Datacenter – Infrastructure is built with a few commodity building blocks using open source software and white boxes
- Agility of a Cloud Provider – Software platforms enable rapid creation of new services
M-CORD brings together the best of the CORD framework and mobile to construct the next-generation mobile edge architecture and pave the way to 5G networks. M-CORD integrates a disaggregated and virtualized RAN and EPC with mobile edge services into CORD. This approach delivers on the two tenets of CORD, offering service providers the ability to customize their edge services with cloud-based economies and agility.
At Radisys, we’re committed to the M-CORD path to 5G. In addition to our role as a systems integrator for CORD, we are the scrum master for M-CORD and one of the collaborating vendors that have come together with ON.Lab and partners, AT&T, SK Telecom and Verizon, to develop the first M-CORD proof-of-concept. Unveiled at the recent Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2016, the PoC showcased a functional M-CORD infrastructure with a number of exciting capabilities, including:
- Processing of wireless data traffic locally at the edge of the network to reduce latency and to improve network resource utilization
- Dynamic radio resource optimization and rapid service creation and instantiation of new cells (RAN), EPC, and edge services
- Network slicing of mobile network
- Enterprise portal for service customization
- Real-time analytics
In the PoC, our FlowEngine software enabled the virtualization and disaggregation of the EPC data plane components, allowing for independent scaling of control and data plane and reduced CapEx and OpEx network costs. We will continue to work closely with the other M-CORD collaborators and sponsoring service providers to bring this PoC to the field.
By advancing a service-driven cloud edge infrastructure, M-CORD sets a critical path towards 5G. Contact me if you’d like to learn more about how Radisys is mobilizing M-CORD.
