Telecom equipment maker Nokia signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to research and enable Cloud RAN (vRAN) and Open RAN technologies to support the development of new customer-focused 5G solutions. The collaboration, which will be conducted at Nokia’s facilities, aims to develop an innovative proof of concepts (PoC) to explore and enable Cloud RAN and related technologies.
Expansion of Cloud-RAN technologies
Nokia aims to extend the reach of its Cloud-RAN technologies in support of 5G deployments and the development of new use cases with this collaboration. This collaboration will also enable communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises with 5G connectivity to utilize AWS across the topology of the mobile network. Operators will be able to simplify the network virtualization and platform layers for the Core and RAN network functions by leveraging the agility and scalability of the cloud.
Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation, DT, said,
“Deutsche Telekom is on a journey to transform to a new open, disaggregated, and cloud-native infrastructure with an automated production model. This collaboration which combines Nokia’s leadership in 5G Open RAN and Cloud RAN with AWS’s cloud platform capabilities and customer-centricity can help to accelerate that journey. The expansion of cloud-native network functions and automation to the RAN will enable new agility and use-cases in the 5G era.”
AWS offers its customers a comprehensive suite of on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs on a pay-as-you-go basis. This collaboration will allow Nokia to leverage AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, and other related services for automating network functionality, or end customer application deployment, scaling, and management.
As part of this collaboration, Nokia will run AWS EKS Anywhere on the Nokia AirFrame Open Edge server. Nokia AirFrame Open Edge distributes computing capacity into the edge of the network and drives the implementation of Cloud RAN, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) as well as 5G.