Radisys and Mavenir integrate vEPC into M-CORD as part of partnership
Wireless network company Radisys Corporation alongside software-based telecom networking provider Mavenir announced they are collaborating to offer communication service providers a way to commercially launch a M-CORD (Mobile Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) open reference solution. According to the companies, the commercially deployable system will open up new use cases, agile service delivery and a value chain for service providers.
Radisys’s M-CORD is an open reference solution for carriers launching a 5G wireless network. It is a cloud-native solution, which leverages software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV) and cloud technologies. Many service providers hope to make 5G networks a commercial reality by 2020.
Mavenir’s virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), on the other hand, is a microservice-based NFV-ready EPC, which was made to function in virtualized environments. As part of the partnership, Radisys integrated Mavenir’s vEPC into its M-CORD distribution.
“We gain a carrier-grade hardened vEPC to be able to provide to customers. From our perspective, Mavenir gains increased access to putting their vEPC into an M-CORD environment,” Neeraj Patel, vice president of solutions and general manager of software and services at Radisys, told RCR Wireless News in an email exchange.
The vEPC, with a split user plane and control plane (CUPS), according to the companies, is able to scale independently in throughput, transaction rate and session capacity. Radisys boasted that benchmarking the system on 40 cores on the M-CORD reference platform delivered a performance of over 15 Gbps. Radisys said all M-CORD services will be able to run on its open compute platform DCEngine, or on a service provider’s hardware platform of choice.
“The combination of Mavenir’s EPC and our RAN integrated into a turnkey M-CORD solution delivers CSPs with the right solution for commercial deployment. This also enables Radisys to truly deliver a best-in-class multi-vendor offering in an M-CORD environment,” Patel said.
Commenting on the hurdles customers ought to be aware of in setting up the solution, Patel added: “CORD is an emerging technology, but with too many moving parts. Most of the customers that are doing PoCs now will be looking for a carrier-grade solution as they move from trials to deployments.”
