Introduction and Purpose of the REC Architecture

Akraino Radio Edge Cloud (REC) provides an appliance tuned to support the O-RAN Alliance and O-RAN Software Community's Radio Access Network Intelligent Controller (RIC) and is the first example of the Telco Appliance blueprint family which provides a reusable set of modules that will be used to create sibling blueprints for other purpose tuned appliances.

• RIC on Kubernetes on “bare metal” tuned for low latency round trip messaging between RIC and eNodeB/gNodeB,
• Support for telco networking requirements such as SRIOV, dual POD interfaces, IPVLAN
• Built from reusable components of the “Telco Appliance” blueprint family
• Automated Continuous Deployment pipeline testing the full software stack (bottom to top, from firmware up to and including application) simultaneously on chassis based extended environmental range servers and commodity datacenter servers
• Integrated with Regional Controller (Akraino Feature Project) for “zero touch” deployment of REC to edge sites
• Deployable to multiple hardware models

High level architectural view:

Objectives

• Fully automated simultaneous deployment and testing on multiple hardware platforms
  • Blueprint defines exact hardware configurations
  • Each hardware variant is deployed into a Continuous Deployment system that runs the full test suite
• Appliance model automates the installation, configuration and testing of:
  • Firmware and/or BIOS/UEFI
  • Base Operating System
  • Components for management of containers, performance, fault, logging, networking, CPU
• Application:
  • RIC is the application running on the REC appliance
  • Other appliances will be created by combining other applications with the same underlying components to create additional blueprints
  • Fully automated testing includes running full application test suite

Components of Radio Edge Cloud

A detailed listing of the git code repositories hosted on the Akraino Gerrit server is available at PCEI Gerrit Code Repository Overview.