The Orchestration and management for Cloud RAN (cRAN) is consist of a suite of Orchestration and OSS systems, including AI/ML advanced analytics systems, to automate the end-to-end service lifecycle starting from the radio network planning, networking topology designing, configuration management, service activation, fault management and performance management.
An Orchestration systems include Network Orchestration and VNF Management for vCU/vDU VNF resources and Service Orchestration for the entire physical and virtual function for cRAN. OSS systems include a Configuration Management (CM), Resource Inventory, Fault Management (FM) and Performance Management (PM) and also Planning and Design Management.
The Orchestration and OSS systems together, enable end-to-end automation starting from Day 0 configuration, Day 1 and Day 2 operations. At high level, Cloud RAN Orchestration can be performed with following stages:
- Planning and designing RF and RAN network to meet technical goals
- Configuring and activating physical network functions (PNFs) and virtual network functions (VNFs) for Cloud RAN
- Lifecycle management with continuous tuning and optimization using AI/ML
The ESTI MANO system provides the the reference architecture for cloudification and can be used for cRAN Orchestration and management for physical and virtual resources to enable automated service provisioning and service lifecycle management. The following steps illustrate the procedure to instantiate and configure the cRAN node at high level.
- All Physical and Virtual resource information can be stored in Resource Inventory, Cloud Infra Inventory and RAN Inventory
- When a radio site installation and physical acceptance is completed and the Radio unit is powered up, it can send a Power ON notification with site specific identifier (Lat/Long, Serial number) to Orchestration Platform through cRAN EMS
- Orchestration system initiates the vDU/vCU deployment process by identifying a particular Site/NFVI resource from Inventory system with the help of Virtual Infrastructure Manager and VNF Manager and apply day 0 configuration
- OSS system then creates a site commissioning/configuration profile for the base station in the EMS
- The deployed vCU requests initialization to Orchestration system to active the base station service with configurations profile and apply license base station configuration data via EMS.
- Cloud RAN EMS notifies Orchestration system about progress of base station commissioning process.
After activation, orchestration systems manages the Day 2 Operations i.e. Cloud RAN lifecycle includes scaling, healing, upgrades, termination and continuous optimization.
Resource Inventory maintains real-time inventory and topology data that can be used by the orchestration and service assurance systems to perform automated lifecycle events and optimization. Service Assurance systems collect events, metrics and telemetry across the RAN network, to enabling automated root cause analysis and auto healing using AI/ML. Configuration Management is used to continuously compare eNB configurations with the golden configurations.
Reference:
- Building an open vRAN ecosystem Whitepaper
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