This Akraino Blueprint, when completed, will be a complete vBBU (virtualized baseband unit) - vCU and vDU (central and distributed unit) design plan. The blueprint will include hardware components, Wind River Linux OVP real-time low latency kernel, Airship, Middleware components, and ONAP (open network automation platform) for policy-driven service orchestration and automation.
Considering the diagram below, the primary performance criteria of the platform is round trip latency of SCTP (stream control transmission protocol) messages. The fundamental operation of the system is that it is a containerized (running on Kubernetes/Docker) application that initiates SCTP connections to eNodeB and gNodeB elements in the RAN (radio access network) and subscribes to what are known as “E2 messages”. When an gNodeB generates an E2 message it needs a response back within a short timeframe or else the response becomes irrelevant.
Using this blueprint, it should be possible to identify and optimize bottlenecks affecting the total round trip time of the E2 message and response. Scaling characteristics with respect to how many gNodeB elements can concurrently connect and how many E2 messages per unit time can be handled.
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Case Attributes
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Description
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Informational
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Type
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New Blueprint for appliance tuned to meet the requirement of the 5G Distributed & Centralized user plan
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Blueprint Family - Proposed Name
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Telco Appliance
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Use Case
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vRAN - DU, CU Applications
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Blueprint proposed Name
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Radio Access Cloud
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Initial POD Cost (capex)
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x86 General Purpose servers x 6
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Scale & Type
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x86/ARM OCP Open Edge x6 or deep edge class
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Applications
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5G vDU or/and vCU
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Power Restrictions
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Example only: Less than 10Kw
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Infrastructure orchestration
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Kubernetes v1.15 or above
Docker 18.6.0-ce1 or above
OS – Wind River Linux LTS 18 (4.18.31-rt)
Under Cloud Orchestration - Airship v1.0
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Low latency real time kernel
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SDN
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OVS, Calico
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Workload Type
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Containers
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Additional Details
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CPU Manager for Kubernetes (CMK)
Node Feature Discovery (NFD) for Kubernetes
NUMA Topology Manager for Kubernetes
Multus
CNI Plugins (support for SRI-IOV CNI, and Userspace CNI)
Device Plugin for Kubernetes (support for SR-IOV, FPGA, and QAT)
Ironic
Keystone
Helm
Ironic
Keystone
runc