Elisa and Wind River have begun rolling out a 5G distributed core platform, an effort that can help spark large-scale 5G launches and spearhead a wave of digital transformations across Europe.
Elisa is a market leader in telecommunications in Finland and a pioneer in 5G and digital services. It operates in an industry where the services of the future are built through continuous development, innovation and cooperation among stakeholders in different fields.
Wind River Studio serves as the cloud infrastructure technology providing a distributed cloud-native platform hosting mission-critical network functions and applications for advanced 5G use cases where low latency and high throughput are required. Wind River also supplies the automation and analytics capabilities needed to run such a distributed network at scale.
To capture business opportunities with 5G services such as private mobile networking, Elisa needs agility, scalability, low latency, high performance and capacity, as well as operational models that include a high degree of automation and monitoring. Therefore, a critical area of investment will be an edge cloud infrastructure technology, as data must be processed with ultra-low latency near the customer to deliver 5G services with an edge infrastructure.
Through native edge cloud infrastructure, Elisa’s objectives will be to follow its distinguishing factor of true “zero-touch deployment, configuration, and enablement with no operator involvement” with the ability to define, commission, and manage edge clouds from a centralized cloud. Elisa selected Wind River as its distributed cloud partner through its proof-of-concept–led selection process.
Elisa’s edge cloud infrastructure for 5G is under commercial production and is beginning to be deployed at scale with the scope to support a fully containerized 5G UPF network function from Elisa’s 5G core vendor as a first application.
In addition, a series of technology assessments has been performed with a radio vendor for O-RAN introduction requiring deterministic real-time processing at the far edge of the network. Wind River Studio is used as a common distributed cloud platform (CaaS) to host multiple vendors’ applications and multiple technologies to extend cloudification of distributed core and radio functionalities.
Studio provides a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems. Its cloud infrastructure capabilities include a cloud-native, Kubernetes and container-based architecture based on the StarlingX open source project, for distributed edge networks at scale.
Addressing the complexities of deploying and managing cloud native vRAN/O-RAN infrastructure, Studio delivers a foundation for a geographically distributed managed solution able to simplify Day 1 and Day 2 operations by providing single-pane of-glass, zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes, no matter the physical location.
For more information about operator capabilities from Wind River Studio, visit.https://www.windriver.com/studio/operator.