Nokia Cloud Mobile Gateway (CMG) Partner Validated

The CMG supports a wide range of mobile gateway functions in the mobile packet core, supporting 2G/3G/4G/5G cellular and Wi-Fi® access networks. Specifically, the CMG supports the following cloud network functions:

• Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN)
• Home Agent (HA) (3GPP2)
• Serving Gateway (SGW)
• Evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG)
• Trusted Wireless Access Gateway/Proxy (TWAG/TWAP)
• Subscriber Services Gateway (SSG)
• Session Management Function (SMF)
• User Plane Function (UPF)
• Network Repository Function (NRF)
• Network Slice Selection Function (NSSF)

The CMG application software has been built from the beginning on the principles and design requirements of cloud networking and web-scale while retaining the feature parity and field reliability of the existing physical Nokia Mobile Gateway. Its control plane is highly resilient, delivering the bearer and system level management with the reliability that is expected in the core network. Field-proven protocols that can handle failure scenarios or race conditions are the foundation of the CMG software.

When the CMG is deployed in 5G SA networks, it supports a service-based architecture (SBA) where core functions use a services model in the control plane to communicate with RESTful APIs (OpenAPI 3.0) over TCP and HTTP2.0 protocols and JSON object serialization. In a SBA, 5G Core functions register with the NRF, providing a profile of its capabilities that can be discovered by other core network functions.

In addition to the mobile gateway functions, the CMG supports the NRF in the 5G Core. In addition to supporting various core network slicing methods (GWCN, eDECOR), the CMG supports 5G SBA network slicing where network resources are allocated to services and/or tenants.

Utilizing the benefits of its cloud-native design, the CMG can flexibly adapt to support a changing mix of control plane and user plane resources. The CMG can also dynamically scale both in and out to meet instantaneous demand for services. The CMG distributed processing architecture enables it to horizontally scale beyond the physical limits of dedicated hardware platforms. The control plane processing scales CPUs to support signaling and call processing while the CMG data plane can scale out by adding more mobile gateway data forwarding to support increasing user plane traffic. As subscriber growth patterns and traffic models change, the CMG can adjust control plane and data plane resources accordingly. The CMG has no dependencies on the protocol scaling limits in the network, allowing applications to dynamically scale and automatically adapt to loads without the need for CSP intervention

The CMG is built on the Nokia SR OS, a real-time, modular and highly fault-tolerant OS design that meets carrier-grade network and reliability requirements. This robust software architecture delivers advanced resiliency capabilities, such as high availability and non-stop routing and services. The CMG supports various intra-VNF redundancy protection schemes (1:1, 1:N, N+K). In addition, the CMG can be deployed in a 1:1 inter-VNF geo-redundant protection scheme. Intra- and inter-redundancy protection delivers reliability and availability levels not easily achieved in IT/ cloud networking environments (greater than 99.999 percent).