Nokia entered 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 products. The announcement comes soon after Nokia entered into a similar partnership with Google Cloud to make cloud-based 5G radio products.
The collaboration, which will be conducted at Nokia’s facilities, aims to develop innovative proof of concepts (PoC) to explore and enable cloud RAN and related technologies. Nokia said it's pursuing a strategy of collaborating with AWS to extend the reach of its cloud RAN technologies in support of 5G deployments and the development of new use cases.
The initiative will see engineering teams from both companies research the ways in which the combination of Nokia’s RAN (Radio Access Network), Open RAN, Cloud RAN and edge products can operate seamlessly with AWS Outposts. This collaboration will enable communications service providers and enterprises with 5G connectivity to use AWS across the topology of the mobile network. Operators will be able to simplify the network virtualisation and platform layers for the Core and RAN network functions by leveraging the agility and scalability of cloud, Nokia said.
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.
The collaboration will cover three distinct areas. First, the project will focus on onboarding and validating Nokia’s 5G vDU (virtualised 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 (virtualised centralised unit) with AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, using Amazon EKS as a cloud native deployment. The third part of the collaboration will build a proof of concept for a platform 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 as an industrial application.
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.
