Nokia and VMware have a long-standing partnership with a focus on the delivery of Nokia network functions on VMware’s telco infrastructure software. Last October, we jointly announced Nokia was the first Network Equipment Provider to certify all its 5G Core functions on VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform. Our cloud-native solutions help our communications service provider (CSP) customers automate, accelerate, and simplify function and element deployment throughout their network. Just as important, the combination will help CSPs accelerate their 5G rollout, reducing the test and validation efforts necessary prior to introducing new capabilities on their networks. This TelecomTV video and Nokia Blog Post offer more information on this collaboration.
With our return to live presence at Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona, we will have many exciting demos and displays on our booth. One demo is a video demonstration of our joint solution with Nokia, giving MWC attendees a look at this capability, along with the chance to speak with our experts. The video will showcase the deployment process of Nokia’s 5G Core functions with a distributed topology on VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform. We will cover two 5G use cases, realizing a CSP working to meet specific concurrent SLAs for
- Mobile broadband
- Ultra-low latency
All of this is done in a matter of minutes.
To lay the foundation for the demo, we initialize a Container as a Service (CaaS) cluster, configured rapidly and deployed using a template. Templates helps speed up the rollout process by simplifying repetitive tasks while reducing error risk. In our case, the template will incorporate the network, storage and compute resource configuration, the system’s scheduling requirements, and CPU balance utilization. At that point we will use Telco Cloud Platform’s automation to auto-discover hardware resources, verify infrastructure requirements are met, and finally kickstart the software stack installation processes based on the template.
With the cluster ready, we will onboard the necessary Nokia 5G network functions, adapting the infrastructure resources to the unique needs of each function. Again, template-based automation will ease the rollout process across the cluster, taking advantage of VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform’s late binding feature. This will allow hardware resources to be dynamically configured based on each CNF’s requirements, avoiding the over-provisioning of valuable hardware resources.
Once set up, Nokia’s 5G Core functions will be ready for configuration, with the demo focusing on user plane functions (UPF) implemented by Nokia’s Cloud Mobile Gateway (CMG). In mere minutes our network will be up and running, ready to handle the mobile broadband use case, featuring a scenario serving users with a 15Mbps video stream over 5G.
The second use case, running on the UPF Edge, will highlight CMG’s strengths in efficiently handling fat flows. These are high bitrate single flows which are critical for high bandwidth 5G applications. CMG can leverage multiple cores in processing single sessions without incurring bottlenecks. As a result, users can benefit from the fastest throughput possible within the configured range, at optimal CPU utilization.
As with any demo, seeing it for yourself is better than reading about it. We would love to see you at the VMware booth at MWC, Stand 3M11 – and you can even schedule a meeting ahead of time.
