MWC 2024 – Conquering New Virtual and Open RAN Frontiers with Wind River

MWC 2024 is rapidly approaching. The global telecommunications community members anticipate this conference with excitement every year so they can showcase their achievements and catch the latest trends in the telco industry. For Wind River, this is an opportunity to demonstrate our progress with the biggest telco carriers in operations at scale for 5G Virtual and Open Ran Deployments.

Major expectations of 5G technology call for delivery of massive volumes of data at high speeds over a vast number of connections, with high reliability and low latency. According to Juniper Research, more than 80% of global operator-billed revenue will be attributed to 5G connections by 2027. The trend of major carriers to transition to virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) is gaining momentum. vRAN and Open RAN allow hardware and software disaggregation and enable operators to introduce innovative services faster. vRAN and Open RAN also create an opportunity to lower TCO compared to Traditional RAN. However, many CSPs are finding a challenge in getting virtual and Open RAN deployed, let alone fully understanding how to manage Day 2 operations.

Wind River Studio – a solution to transition carriers to virtualized and open networks while positioning them for growth

Wind River Studio delivers a Containers as a Service (CaaS) platform that provides a unified approach to managing and orchestrating cloud-native applications across multiple locations. Studio includes a core capability with some exciting new features for telco operators to support their vRAN and Open RAN initiatives: operations at Scale.

Why is the Scale at the Edge is so important?

Wind River Studio offers innovative scalability and deployment paradigms that enable remarkable savings in cost of ownership: instead of commissioning four to six servers, now you can run the same workloads on just one or two. We invested in a small footprint at the edge and reduced processing core requirements on 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors down to a single core. The additional core capacity can then be used to add new features and drive applications instead of the infrastructure, with greater performance of the vRAN with fewer resources. And this is just the beginning.

Why is Automation becoming essential at the Edge?

As customer demand increases, easily deploying and seamlessly scaling the number of servers, or subclouds, needed at the edge of the network is important to allow an operator to grow services fast while maintaining quality and reliability. Automation plays a key role in minimizing efforts needed to scale a network while preserving quality of operations.

Start from the basics – Deployment Automation of Day 0-1

Automating the discovery/audit and deployment process reduces deployment time and cost, and focuses human activity on exception management. Automating the configuration of the CaaS as part of the CaaS deployment, or as part of a re-configuration activity, makes it ready to accept a specific workload with minimal human interaction, which amounts to impressive savings of time and resources. Wind River created the most optimized process with minimum human interaction to complete this critical initial step in the network deployment – Day 0-1.

Examining the Most Common Operation in the Network – Day 2 Upgrade

Wind River takes Upgrade Automation to a completely new level: we are doing it with one-click (of course, when you prepare a file with a valid sequence of commands).

Wind River Studio allows the creation of a separate deployment automation sequence based on the requested and target state. The previously separate workflows will be combined into a single activity.  The individual workflows are then executed against that sequence to perform the required operation. We can upgrade all components, starting from hardware to thousands of fully commissioned cell sites in a single maintenance window.

See it in person at MWC - visit our booth in Hall 2-2F25 to see a demonstration of how we deploy a massive number of subclouds with one click, then perform a one-click upgrade.

More highlights to see while visiting us at MWC:

• Operations at Scale: Find out how we help our biggest customers manage tens of thousands of geo-distributed virtual and Open RAN nodes.
• V2X: See how the connected vehicle of the future will drive innovative technology and monetization opportunities.
• Customer Showcase: Learn about our core solutions used by Elisa and others
• Partner Ecosystem: See a variety of use cases from the most relevant ecosystem vendors supplying virtual and Open RAN solutions

To learn more about what we are doing, meet with us at MWC by booking a meeting here: Wind River at MWC 2024.

About the author

Emily Goldshteyn is a Senior Product Marketing Line Manager at Wind River