NEC, Qualcomm, Red Hat, HPE demonstrate Open vRAN, 5G Core UPF using Arm-based CPUs

NEC Corporation along with ecosystem partners Arm, Qualcomm Technologies, Red Hat, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have successfully demonstrated the end-to-end operation of NEC’s Open virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) and 5G Core virtual User Plane Function (UPF).

The demonstration utilised the HPE ProLiant servers running Arm Neoverse-based CPUs and the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card, with Red Hat OpenShift in conditions “equivalent to a commercial environment”, NEC said on Wednesday. Juniper Networks’s fronthaul switch ACX7024 and layer 3 Switch QFX5120-48Y, and Viavi Solutions’ TM500 Network Tester and TeraVM Core Simulator were also used.

The Japanese multinational said its Open vRAN and the 5G Core vUPF deployed on the same server as the vCU are “carrier-grade quality cloud-native applications”, and comply with the O-RAN Alliance and 3GPP standards.

According to NEC, the use of an in-line accelerator demonstrates “Open RAN enabling a multi-vendor landscape using modern network equipment, and workload-optimized compute independent of CPU architecture”, as opposed to all workload processing being done on legacy, single-vendor equipment.

Katsumi Tanoue, General Manager, Global Mobile Solution Department at NEC, said, “This demonstration is a proof-point where the latest HW (hardware) technologies, combined with carrier-grade Open RAN SW (software) result in energy efficient, innovative and competitive RAN solutions.”