The Provider Access Edge blueprint from the Kubernetes Native Infrastructure family is ready to deploy specific Telco applications such as 5G networks and MEC workloads. Telco / 5G network functions are among the more exigent Kubernetes workloads, but they are not unique: customers from high performance computing, high frequency trading, industrial control, et al. are asking for pretty much similar sets of capabilities. Our first landing application tested on the KNI PAE blueprint on baremetal was OpenAirInterface (https://www.openairinterface.org/).
The OpenAirInterface alliance has made a great effort on moving all the components that form a 4G/5G mobile network to the Kubernetes world. Building all the container images and writing the corresponding manifests to match a specific deployment model has been a tremendous work.
To support the 5G network in a production-like deployment, we configured the OpenShift based KNI PAE blueprint to segregate real-time and non-real-time compute workloads as well as management, control, and data plane traffic according to the following logical deployment architecture:
5G is designed to bring to the enterprise world as well as to the regular consumer, high throughput and low latency bandwidth that will enable the use cases of the future like IoT, autonomous cars, and many other applications deployed at the edge of the networks. The Akraino Kubernetes Native Infrastructure blueprint family allows to run these very demanding workloads on top, and OpenAirInterface has chosen us as the reference platform.
In order to test OAI on your own environment, please start from: