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Radisys Series — Who Disaggregated My RAN?
eBook
Chapter 8:
Orchestrating the Open RAN Symphony
We left off in our series having looked at the virtualized and cloud-based open RAN. Now we move on to consider
the orchestration part, deploying and managing these cloud-based implementations.
Orchestration, or service management and orchestration (SMO), has been used in the enterprise world for some
time to manage a number of virtual machines in a public cloud-based implementation in some form or another.
Over time, the market has continued to develop specific orchestration products for a variety of vertical industries
and has driven a number of innovations.
SMOs provide lifecycle management of virtualized network functions (VNFs), such as creating new instances of an
application, increasing or decreasing the number of instances to scale to meet the load, managing the multiple
instances, and then shutting them down when there is no longer a need.
ETSI and Telco Virtualization
For telecom, orchestration was originally
described and established as a reference
architecture in the early specification from the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute
(ETSI). In 2013, ETSI released the first NFV
reference architecture implementations which
established how telecom network functions can
be implemented in a virtual machine environment
and the technical requirements for such
deployments. ETSI's NFV reference architecture
provided well defined interfaces for these network
functions towards virtualization infrastructure and
orchestrator as shown in Diagram #1.
Diagram 1: Simplified view of orchestrator interfaces in ETSI NFV
architecture