AT&T, ON.Lab and Radisys Demo M-CORD for SDX Central’s DemoFriday

Joseph Sulistyo

At Radisys, we were excited to collaborate recently with SDxCentral to showcase a live demo of M-CORD as part of SDxCentral’s “DemoFriday.” I joined Tom Tofigh, the principal member of technical staff at AT&T, and Pingping Lin, a member of the technical staff at ON.Lab, to provide attendees with a sneak peek at the M-CORD Proof-of-Concept capabilities. In this webinar, moderated by SDxCentral Co-Founder Roy Chua, we showcased how M-CORD delivers an innovative approach and infrastructure for deploying innovative mobile services.

So why do we need a new infrastructure? Tom shared how, in just the last five years, wireless data traffic has grown by an astounding 150,000%! Mobile operators need to act now to support this growth. They are seeking to “SDNize” their equipment in order to virtualize functions in traditional equipment and transition their networks to a cloud-based environment. This will result in reduced CapEx and OpEx, and allow mobile operators to deploy new services quickly.

Fortunately, operators are embracing the CORD framework (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) to take advantage of an open service delivery platform designed to provide data center economics and cloud agility. Mobile-Cord (M-CORD) brings the best of two worlds together by integrating a disaggregated and virtualized RAN and EPC with mobile edge services into CORD.

During the webinar, we explained how our FlowEngine software disaggregates the EPC data plane components, allowing for independent scaling. Pingping then hosted the live demonstration from ON.Lab, showcasing different M-CORD use cases and highlighting how M-CORD makes it easy for mobile operators to bring up new services. The engaging demo showed how the M-CORD infrastructure provides optimized services, such as video optimization where the video is located in the cache at the edge. Compared to a mobile video powered by legacy equipment, the mobile video running on M-CORD was delivered with much higher quality without buffering. By bringing services to the edge of the network, mobile operators can deliver a far better user experience.

Lessons Learned

The M-CORD Proof of Concept was developed through collaboration between mobile operators and the vendor community with support from ON.Lab technical staff. When I asked Tom about lessons learned from this project, he shared that he was impressed by how communities can come together and create a start-up environment to bring this PoC to fruition in just three weeks. Additionally, Pingping provided insight on how the collaborators worked together to integrate their own solutions to follow the M-CORD architecture.

The full webinar can be viewed on SDxCentral’s website. I encourage you to contact us at Radisys if you have questions about M-CORD or Radisys’ FlowEngine solutions.

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