Market Overview:

With the success of cloud technology in the enterprise realm, the telecom industry is now looking to the cloud to reap the same benefits – economies of scale, cost effectiveness, scalability, lower CAPEX and OPEX. Operators want to embrace cloud technologies in their central offices and network functions to achieve these benefits.

However, the telecom cloud is not the same as the IT cloud; the telecom industry’s demanding requirements for five-nines availability, scalability, reliability and complex networking must be met, and a supplementary approach is required. In addition, operators want to leverage the significant investment they’ve already made in their telecom infrastructure.

Known as one of the most revolutionary technologies to arrive to the market in recent years,software-defined networking (SDN) transforms the way networks are managed, controlled and used. With its ability to automate application deployment, SDN provides a powerful complement to Network Funcations Virtualizations’s (NFV) ability to maximum utilization of hardware resources

Radisys Solution:

Current telecom infrastructure has disparate network elements such as routers, packet/serving gateways, firewalls, policy control, and the list goes on. Orchestrating these elements to work together to rapidly create a new service is nearly impossible. In addition, there is significant OPEX cost tied to managing these diverse networks and elements. SDN enables the separation of the control plane and the data plane to facilitate improved management and increase service velocity.

Radisys is implementing an innovative way to facilitate the transition of these network elements into more manageable separate control and data plane entities. Radisys has developed an edge routerapplication that enables operators to implement SDN in a staged manner. This approach first separates the control and data plane for the edge router functionality in the wireless gateway. This separation of the functions within the same hardware is an easier first step.

When required, the control plane can be separated to be outside the platform. By implementing SDN in this manner, operators can minimize their integration risk as well as leverage their existing Telco infrastructure. This approach can be extended to most of the network elements and enable a more cohesive management approach to reducing the OPEX for the operators.

Radisys also offers media processing solutions for the Telecom Cloud. Our Software MRF has been optimized for virtualized cloud deployments, offering IP audio and video media processing for IMS Service Delivery and Conferencing applications.