By Sukhdev Kapur
The rollout of 5G is a technological disruption for telecom and technology business players. This requires management of real time data flows, with central control, between various edge and core deployments. In order to minimize the latency, 5G and IoT deployments require compute power to move toward the edge, closer to the end-users and devices that produce or consume the real time data.
SDN controllers are proven to manage such workloads in telco as well as enterprise deployments. In this article, we discuss the SDN stack Tungsten Fabric and how it can be used for 5G networks and an edge cloud that is based upon Akraino Edge Stack.
Tungsten Fabric (AKA ‘TF’) is an open source SDN project in the LF Networking initiative. TF provides a single point of control, visibility, and management for networking & security for different types of data center deployments or clouds. It has taken SDN technology to next level by:
- Providing consistent network functionality and enforcing security policies for different types of workloads (virtual machines, containers, bare metal) orchestrated with different available orchestrators (OpenStack, Kubernetes, VMware , etc)
- Providing production grade networking & security stack for Data Center and Public Clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) & Edge cloud deployments
Tungsten Fabric evolved as a network software stack for providing an SDN solution for Telco Cloud and NFV use cases.
Tungsten Fabric Integration with Akraino Edge Cloud
TF, by integrating with Akraino Edge Stack, can act as unified SDN controller to enhance many features for 5G core and edge nodes, including:
- Enabling distributed edge computing using TF remote compute architecture
- A common SDN controller for different workloads in network cloud i.e. CNF, VNF, PNFs (Containerized, Virtual, and Physical Network Functions)
- Service chaining at different types of edge sites or clouds (public or private)
- Common security policy enforcement for all nodes
- Advanced networking performance features: SR/IOV, DPDK, BGP-VPN, IPSec/TLS Support, etc.
Tungsten Fabric powered Akraino Blueprints
These Akraino blueprints address different edge use cases:
- Network Cloud – Telco edge cloud use case
- Kubernetes Native Infrastructure for Edge – Provider access use case
- Integrated Edge Cloud – AI/ML and AR/VR applications at Edge
Learn more at Cloud Native Network Services Day @ KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2019
Intrigued? I’ll be doing a deep dive on this subject at the Cloud Native Network Services Day at KubeCon EU on May 20th. If you’re going to be in Barcelona for the conference, come by and learn more.
