The projects involve Nokia’s Radio Access Network (RAN), Open RAN, Cloud RAN (vRAN) and edge cloud technologies.
In collaboration with Google Cloud, Nokia is to develop new, cloud-based 5G radio solutions which combine Nokia’s RAN, Open RAN, vRAN and edge cloud technologies, with Google’s edge computing platform and applications ecosystem.
Nokia said this project will lead to the development of solutions and use cases to solve key 5G scenarios for businesses worldwide.
Bikash Koley, VP, Google Global Network and head of technology for telecom products at Google Cloud, said: “This partnership with Nokia will combine both of our decades of mobile communications expertise to deliver new solutions that help CSPs enable business transformation at the network edge.”
The initial collaboration, which is already underway at Nokia’s Espoo headquarters, will pursue multiple workstreams. The first, which will focus on Cloud RAN, will integrate Nokia’s 5G vDU (virtualised distributed unit) and 5G vCU (virtualised centralised unit) with Google’s edge computing platform, running on Anthos.
Nokia’s 5G standalone network with vCU and 5G core will also be tested on Google Cloud Anthos platform as a cloud-native deployment.
Meanwhile, with AWS an agreement has been signed to extend the reach of Cloud RAN technologies in support of 5G deployments and the development of new use cases. This will see AWS "research and enable" vRAN and Open RAN technologies to support the development of new customer-focused 5G solutions.
Based out of Nokia’s facilities the project is intended to develop innovative proof of concepts (PoC) to explore and enable Cloud RAN and related technologies.
The project will cover three distinct areas. First, the project will focus on onboarding and validating Nokia’s 5G vDU (virtualized distributed unit) on AWS Outposts using Amazon EKS for far edge cloud or on-premises deployments.
The second area will examine the implementation of Nokia’s 5G vCU with AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, using Amazon EKS as a cloud native deployment. The third part of the collaboration will build a PoC for an end-to-end solution with Nokia’s 5G Cloud RAN and 5G standalone Core network running on AWS, where end enterprise users can leverage 5G for use cases such an industrial application.
Dave Brown, VP, Amazon EC2, AWS, said: “This collaboration with Nokia will extend the reach of our industry-leading cloud technology to support our telco and enterprise customers.
"We look forward to working closely on this collaboration and offer multiple deployment choices for customers to build 5G Cloud RAN and Open RAN solutions. Our customers will benefit from different options to run 5G RAN using AWS Outposts with either Intel or ARM-based CPU choices, or third-party bare metal servers while using Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere.
"This will solve for the challenge of CI/CD, automation, and network orchestration by using a common framework of tools across Core and RAN.”
Tommi Uitto (pictured), president of mobile networks at Nokia, commented: “This is a critically important collaboration and the continuation of Nokia’s Cloud RAN leadership. At Nokia we are committed to supporting our customers and giving them the flexibility and elasticity they need on the network edge. We are building an ecosystem of public cloud partners that will ultimately support our customers and help them to build compelling 5G use cases.”
The third agreement, with Microsoft, will develop cloud solutions and new market-ready 4G and 5G private wireless use cases for enterprises.
The project, which will run in three stages, will see Nokia combine its mobile network solutions including Cloud RAN, Open RAN, Radio Access Controller (RIC) and multi-access edge cloud (MEC) with the Azure Private Edge Zone
Nokia said the initiative aims to achieve "a better performance and end user experiences for third party app developers via the Azure ecosystem when exposed to the network."
Nokia will also integrate its 5G RAN with Azure 4G/5G core to demonstrate interworking to support enterprise use cases required by Microsoft’s customers.
Additionally, Microsoft and Nokia will explore further opportunities to incorporate Nokia Airframe Open Edge server as part of its telco edge strategy. Nokia AirFrame Open Edge server 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.
