NEC, Netcracker Orchestrate Cloud-Native 5G Core on AWS

NEC Corporation and Netcracker, a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC, announced have deployed their 5G Core and full stack Digital BSS/OSS on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to orchestrate and automate 5G digital services. The solution will be displayed at the AWS Virtual Village during Mobile World Congress.

In this demonstration, NEC deploys its 5G Core control plane on an AWS Region and its 5G UPF on an AWS Outposts' edge location. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, application programming interfaces (APIs), and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

The edge location is connected to the AWS Local Zone where applications are hosted. 5G services and network slices can be ordered on-demand from Netcracker's Digital Marketplace, and its orchestration systems dynamically place the 5G workloads and applications in the appropriate AWS Local Zone. This setup guarantees the very low latency and very high data capacity necessary for services such as interactive media traffic.

NEC and Netcracker have the ability to run their applications on private or public cloud environments (on premises, edge or centralized). They also utilize advanced technologies, such as network slicing, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS). Their adaptability and technological innovation generate a variety of new use cases, helping CSPs to create a wide range of innovative B2X services.

NEC's 5G Core was instantiated using Netcracker's Core Domain Orchestration solution. The solution combines Network and Service Orchestration, Digital OSS and AI/Analytics to automate full lifecycle management and monitoring, including scale-up and scale-down operations, across distributed AWS Regions and AWS Zones. Netcracker's Cross-Domain Service Orchestration provides an end-to-end network view for services and slices across RAN, transport and core domains. It monitors resource consumption, triggers dynamic scaling and healing, and applies closed-loop control policy in response to certain events. Based on traffic usage or user requests, additional UPF instances are instantiated on AWS Outposts and more bandwidth is allocated in the transport network.

The solution will be demonstrated at the AWS Virtual Village during Mobile World Congress.

Patrick Lopez, Global VP of Product Management, 5G products, NEC, commented: “NEC has deployed its 4G and 5G Mobile Core Solution on AWS for the commercial services of multiple service providers in Japan. Our Core and its associated orchestration products allow us to provide sophisticated capabilities, such as end-to-end slicing, ultra-low latency and multi-cloud deployment options, which are key to realize the promises of 5G monetization."

“Netcracker is helping service providers leverage the power of cloud-native software and distributed AWS environments to deliver an exciting range of new B2X 5G services," says Bob Titus, Chief Technology Officer, Netcracker. “With our Orchestration and Digital BSS/OSS systems, service providers can automate networks and services across all network and cloud domains and monetize the network in innovative new ways."