Presented at Cradlepoint’s 2021 Global Partner Summit event, the demonstration was carried out at Ericsson's Silicon Valley D-15 Labs, showing how 5G network slicing can protect business-critical application data from surrounding congestion while ensuring a steady throughput rate.
"Demonstrating Ericsson network slicing technology working with a Cradlepoint 5G router to protect business-critical flows is incredibly important to accelerating enterprise adoption of 5G," said Marc Bresniker, vice president of product management at Cradlepoint.
"With Ericsson, we're taking the first step in enabling this technology and bringing MPLS-like traffic management capabilities to 5G that enterprises will require as they cut-the-cord and shift more applications to Wireless WANs."
Specifically, the lab testbed was comprised of a Cradlepoint R1900 5G Mobile Router, running in Standalone mode, connecting to an Ericsson 5G Core and 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) with network slicing and slice-aware quality of service configured.
In addition, several PCs were running traffic-generator software to emulate ‘business-critical and best-effort data’ across a 5G connection while a mobile device injects congestion into the network.
Through the demonstration it showed the best-effort flows slowing to a crawl as the RAN and 5G connection becomes congested. In comparison, the business-critical data is protected and maintains a steady throughput rate.
"We first started to develop network slicing technology with enterprise frontrunner partners here in D-15 a few years ago,” said Jan Söderström, head of Ericsson's Silicon Valley technology office.
"Our goal was to present this innovation to the industry and share a glimpse of the future. It was radical but something which we did for the industry. Today I'm thrilled that – together with Cradlepoint – we have demonstrated how to protect business-critical enterprise application flows in the 5G mobile network with network slicing."
Overall, Ericsson's network-slicing technology, interoperating Cradlepoint 5G routers, addresses the need for Wireless WAN and 5G as essential infrastructure for connecting fixed sites, field forces, vehicles, and IoT devices, as well as the need to ensure that their critical applications are not affected by "noise neighbour" traffic on a shared 5G RAN.
Cradlepoint is working with Ericsson to deliver integrated enterprise 5G network slicing functionality by the end of 2021.
