KDDI picks Wind River for 5G Open vRAN sites in Japan

Wind River®, a global enabler in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems, has announced that Wind River Studio is being used by KDDI for its O-RAN­–compliant 5G virtualized base station, which began commercial deployment this January in Osaka, Japan.

For its 5G virtualized base station, KDDI uses Wind River Studio Cloud Platform technology for an automated configuration (zero-touch provisioning) system. Wind River Studio Analytics is used to monitor the status of geographically distributed far edge clouds. Studio addresses the complex challenges service providers face in deploying and managing geographically distributed, ultra-low latency infrastructure and enables large-scale deployment of 5G virtualized base stations.

“Operators can work with Wind River for solutions to help prepare for a cloud-native future and deliver on high-reliability, ultra-low-latency, and highly efficient solutions for next-generation networks,” said Avijit Sinha, chief product officer, Wind River. “Working closely with leaders such as KDDI, Wind River can deliver proven technology based on Wind River Studio that is live with operators in global deployments.”

The expansion of use cases for 5G services and the diversification and increase in the number of terminal types are expected to lead to a rapid increase in the volume of communications. 5G network infrastructure requires more advanced systems, faster deployment, and lower costs than ever before. To meet these growing demands, KDDI is developing virtualized base stations that implement an open interface compliant with the O-RAN standard. This 5G virtualized base station is a software update to such base stations, which were successfully commercially deployed in February 2022.

A leader in the 5G landscape, Wind River has played key roles in the world’s first successful 5G data session and in building commercial vRAN/O-RAN programs, including one of the largest Open RAN networks in the world.

Studio Cloud Platform provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. It delivers a foundation for a geographically distributed managed solution able to simplify Day 1 and Day 2 operations by providing single-pane-of-glass, zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes, no matter where their physical location. Studio addresses the challenges of deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud-native infrastructure to provide traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/Open RAN deployment.

Studio Analytics solutions reduce carrier efforts and improve the efficiency of monitoring and operating the distributed cloud by collecting and analyzing cloud behavioral data to generate meaningful insights for decision-making.