The Akraino Radio Edge Cloud (REC) blueprint was created for the purpose of providing a Kubernetes based platform for running the O-RAN community's RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and a number of trials were run as described in the presentation below. The trials were successful, but there was not enough ongoing community participation in the REC blueprint to sustain the ongoing development of the current codebase. This special interest group is intended to gather interest from RAN operators who are interested in deploying an Open RAN platform, including RAN Intelligent Controller and CU/DU/RU as well as RAN and Cloud vendors who are interested in selling an Open Source based platform.

REC TA - Akraino Meeting 2021-03.pptx

This SIG will coordinate with O-RAN and O-RAN-SC as proposed in Proposal for Akraino Collaboration with O-RAN and O-RAN-SC and act as a focal point for Akraino participants who are interested in the RAN space but are not currently active in O-RAN.

As discussed at the 03/01/2021 - 03/03/2021 Akraino Technical Meetings - Spring, AT&T will stop supporting the REC blueprint as it is not AT&T's intention to act as a vendor of this software but AT&T continues to be a strong proponent of Open RAN. We are currently moving forward with other alternatives as the Kubernetes based platform but welcome interest from the Akraino community in either transitioning the REC blueprint to a new codebase, or transitioning the O-RAN software components to another Akraino blueprint using some other codebase.

Some of the key attributes of the original REC codebase that we feel are particularly important are:

  • Zero touch bare metal deployment of Kubernetes clusters
  • Support for small footprint clusters, as few as three to five servers
  • Deployment over layer 3 networks (i.e. avoiding the need for layer 2 connectivity between a PXE boot server and the target cluster which may be at a remote location)
  • "Frozen" deployment images that allow all dependencies to be incorporated at build time into an image that can be archived and transported. The image can be deployed without requiring network connectivity to pull in software at install time.

How to Get Involved

The primary point of contact to get involved is Paul Carver . Feel free to reach out via email either directly or via the Akraino blueprint mailing list https://lists.akraino.org/ with the REC tag or join an Akraino Technical Steering Committee (TSC) meeting.

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