Radisys and KDDI Research Kick Off 5G Collaboration with Successful Demonstration of RAN Slicing Use Cases

Radisys® Corporation, a global leader of open telecom solutions, today announced that Radisys and KDDI Research have completed the world’s first successful demonstration showcasing RAN slicing involving different traffic streams with different latency requirements on a single Radio Unit (RU) connected to multiple Centralized Units/Distributed Units in a disaggregated network topology. Network slice orchestration is a central architectural construct for 5G networks and mobile operators crucially need this flexibility to create service-specific network slices to deploy complex 5G services cost effectively.

Highlights

Network slicing is increasingly enabling key use cases that require high data speeds and throughput and low latency, such as Augmented Reality, IoT driven connectivity for smart electricity meters, and on-demand coverage for critical services. To demonstrate 5G RAN slicing, Radisys created the entire end-to-end configuration comprised of the 5G New Radio in Standalone mode operating in sub-6 GHz and the 5G core nodes, and it demonstrated services to ride on network slices.

The demonstration included the creation of a network slice for eMBB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband) service that spanned a pair of Distributed Units (DU) in an edge cloud site and a Centralized Unit User Plane (CU-UP) in a regional cloud site. This allows an architectural construct of a Network Slice consisting of Intelligent Edge and regional cloud with functionalities to host a 5G service. While eMBB is a high-speed data service, another network slice was created for Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communication (URLLC) service employing another pair of DUs in the edge cloud.

Key features of the demonstration include:

• Network slicing to implement workloads for 5G services both edge and regional clouds
• Showcasing two important 5G services: eMBB and URLLC
• Creating multiple slices in a single cell

For this demo, Radisys provided an end-to-end configuration consisting of:

• 5G NR (New Radio) gNodeB in Standalone mode operating in sub-6 GHz frequency range along with RAN controller
• 5G Core Network including Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF), Session Management Function (SMF) and User Plane Function (UPF)
• eMBB and URLLC service functionality portioned in edge and regional clouds

“Our deep partnership with KDDI Research is evident with this critical demonstration of advanced network slicing where we connected multiple CUs and DUs to a single RU,” said Arun Bhikshesvaran, CEO, Radisys. “This demo goes beyond the typical single DU and RU binding and really brings to the forefront how mobile operators will manage their networks with intelligent edge deployments and scale into regional clouds to optimize efficiency and operational costs in order to realize the benefits of 5G disaggregation.”

“Radisys is a global leader with its 5G enabling technology and we were impressed by the flexibility of its architecture as Radisys was able to realize this complex topology with minimal changes to its stack architecture,” said Yoji Kishi, general manager, KDDI Research. “Collaboration between KDDI Research and Radisys has been ground-breaking and we look forward to further enhancing the RAN Controller based architecture and apply it for Big Data manipulation and Machine Learning to automate the network.”

Source: Radisys media announcement