RAN
A 5G RAN environment typically consists of a mix of C-RAN and D-RAN sites. The C-RAN sites use bandwidth-intensive fronthaul connections and will continue to take advantage of physical routers. Some larger D-RAN sites may also use physical routers. However, providers will often take advantage of smaller D-RAN sites, that can easily number in the tens of thousands, to access user populations.
With a large number of D-RAN sites, cost is a key factor—both CapEx and OpEx must be optimized. Providers often use small, leased sites with limited space, power, and cooling to reduce expenses. To further save costs, they use leased lines and take advantage of less bandwidth-intensive midhaul connections.
Telco virtual private cloud (VPC)
As infrastructure expands to support 5G, more radio sites are required, and data centers need to be expanded. One option is to build out data centers in hyperscaler public cloud environments; however, the current cloud-native routing within these environments does not support the full routing functionality required for telco VPCs such as MPLS, quality of service (QoS), L3 VPN, IP address management, and others.
Prior to Cloud-Native Router, the other option was to use virtual routers within virtual machines (VMs) but these are not desirable in the hyperscaler network as they are not truly cloud-native and have complicated management and other drawbacks. Cloud-Native Router solves these issues, integrating directly into the cloud as a CNI in Kubernetes on the same server as the application and can be managed as a cloud-native Kubernetes component for simpler deployment. It also integrates the advanced routing capabilities to meet telco VPC requirements and eliminates the drawbacks of a VM solution in this environment.
Juniper Cloud-Native Router (JCNR) is a container-based software solution that combines the JCNR-controller (cRPD-based control plane) and the JCNR-vRouter (DPDK-enabled forwarding/data plane). With the cloud-native router, you can enable Junos OS-based switching control with enhanced forwarding capabilities.
JCNR-controller running on a Kubernetes (K8s) compute-host provides control plane management functionality and uses the forwarding capabilities provided by either the Linux kernel or the DPDK-enabled JCNR-vRouter.
DPDK is an open source set of libraries and drivers. DPDK enables fast packet processing by allowing network interface cards (NICs) to send direct memory access (DMA) packets directly into an application’s address space. The applications poll for packets, to avoid the overhead of interrupts from the NIC. Integrating with DPDK allows a vRouter to process more packets per second than is possible when the vRouter runs as a kernel module.
