Skip navigation
Like what you’re reading?

Automated RAN life cycle management and orchestration – Key enabler of future networks

Automated RAN Life Cycle Management is revolutionizing network efficiency. By integrating agile methodologies and advanced automation, Communication Service Providers can enhance performance, reduce costs, and swiftly adapt to evolving demands in the competitive telecom landscape.

Strategic Product Manager, Life Cycle Services, Service Area Networks

Strategic Product Manager, Cloud RAN, Product Area Networks

Hashtags
Hashtags
#OpenRAN
Automated RAN Life Cycle Management and Orchestration – Key enabler of future networks

Strategic Product Manager, Life Cycle Services, Service Area Networks

Strategic Product Manager, Cloud RAN, Product Area Networks

Strategic Product Manager, Life Cycle Services, Service Area Networks

Contributor (+1)

Strategic Product Manager, Cloud RAN, Product Area Networks

Hashtags
#OpenRAN

RAN Software Life Cycle Management and Orchestration require a comprehensive strategy overseeing the entire network lifespan, from design, integration, deployment, optimization to operation.

Mobile networks are increasingly becoming software driven. Agile software development combined with Git Operations (GitOps) has been a game-changer for the software industry, allowing teams to deliver high-quality products rapidly while adapting to changing requirements. However, the landscape of software delivery and deployment in the telecom sector is evolving, driven by a disaggregated architecture and cloudification, and with it, the methodologies that we use must also evolve.

Automated Life Cycle Management (LCM) refers to a set of agile operation methodologies and capabilities that aim to increase efficiency and reliability in Communication Service Providers (CSP) networks operational processes. This happens through a higher level of automation and scalability in software lifecycle orchestration architectures.

GitOps acts as a master key in the operational framework to boost security, consistency, and reliability in software deployment. Seamless code changes throughout application life cycle management and infrastructure configuration makes CSPs more agile to deploy new advanced features in the competitive landscape.

RAN software lifecycle is a key area of focus in mobile operator’s digital transformation strategies as they strive to efficiently manage the increasingly complex network, reduce operating costs, minimize energy consumption, optimize network performance, improve end-user experience, and enable new services.

RAN Software Life Cycle Management and Orchestration requires a comprehensive strategy overseeing the entire network lifespan, from design, integration, deployment, optimization to operation.


1. The Current State of Agility in RAN SW Lifecycle Operation: A Critical Reflection

Agile and GitOps methodologies have reshaped how we approach software development as well as software delivery and deployment, shifting focus from rigid planning to iterative progress and continuous network deployment and feedback. However, as 5G networks become more complex and the speed of technology accelerates, traditional network software lifecycling practices are beginning to show their limitations.

Non-automated Deployment Methodologies: The RAN domain is becoming increasingly complex in the 5G era, particularly in terms of advanced features with their numerous dependencies, programmability, and parameter setting, among others. This is stretching the traditional network upgrade and optimization methodologies. Teams are often overwhelmed by the SW acceptance validation, verification, and local tools adaptation, leading to significant inefficiencies.

Operational Costs: Upgrading the network more frequently is perceived as a cumbersome and costly process for many operators. Open RAN with multi supply dimension can potentially increase the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Budget constraint is one of the major reasons that many operators encounter to adopt new RAN features.

SW Acceptance & Deployment Duration: In the digital era, mobile networks are considered as critical public services. CSPs follow rigorous software validation processes to ensure that upgrades bear no negative impact on the network performance. Supplying software from different vendors requires validation in the local environment to adapt to each operator’s network configuration and demands. The software acceptance process in the operators’ labs is a manual and lengthy process.

2. The inevitability of automation and agile in network life cycle management

Growing Complexity of RAN in the 5G era: The RAN functional disaggregation, architectural flexibility, cross-domain coordination, and end-user experiences are just a few examples of growing complexity. These call for the use of intelligent automation to simplify the management and orchestration of RAN across multi-domain operations, from network planning, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting and optimization through the entire life cycle of networks.

Continuous software delivery for continuous change: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and Deployment (CI/CDD) and automation are the cornerstones of true digital transformation. The goal of CI/CDD is to enable repeatable and low-risk updates of all components/layers of the architecture stack to get automated and deployed with faster cadence. It also incorporates software pipelines and customized workflows to streamline operational activities.

Fostering a culture of continuous improvement: Encourage a culture of continuous improvement within the organization by evolving toward automated processes. Regular feedback loops, open communication, and a willingness to adapt are vital for the ongoing success of network management. Implementing these steps will help organizations to effectively manage their network lifecycle, ensuring a robust, secure, and efficient network infrastructure.

3. An Overview of RAN Software Life Cycle Management Automation

Continuous Delivery and Deployment (CDD) in cloud-native software-centric networking: Network agility is the adoption driver for cloud-native networks. Operators hope to be able to make rapid, granular changes to microservices-based, cloud-native network functions (NFs). However, achieving this agility requires automated pipelines that can attest and check the security of software upgrades, provision cloud infrastructure and deploy or update NFs on this infrastructure.

Telecom DevOps infrastructure must be tailored to accommodate CSPs’ unique environment, testing process and business approval procedures. DevOps or more specifically CDD use agile processes to reduce Time-To-Market for new product and features and break down existing silos, resulting in a more cohesive network management.

Mobile operators need to adopt the pipeline capabilities from vendors to simplify deployment. For example, an NF vendor may provide pipelines that simplify in-service software upgrades (ISSUs) by providing mechanisms to orchestrate pre/post-upgrade checks and route traffic to or from nodes. On-premises software repositories, test execution engines or security scanning tools are among other adoption capabilities.

Continuous Delivery and Deployment (CDD) in cloud-native software-centric networking


GitOps-based Operation
: Mobile Operators need to embrace a GitOps-based approach to enable networks to be defined declaratively in Git to deploy and reconcile by focusing on repository as a single source of truth for the code.

One of the challenges that CSPs face is the configuration drift in network infrastructure. Human error and undocumented changes to network can cause configuration drift. Configuration drift can affect the performance, compliance, and security of CNFs. The traditional management often lacks audit logs or version control which would improve accountability and simplify restoring networks infrastructure to previous version.

GitOps is a methodology that applies the best practices in development to software automation. It uses a declarative approach that forms the basis of continuous everything. GitOps utilizes continuous reconciliation and closed-loop capabilities to maintain the desired state. It makes sure that changes to configuration files automatically applied to new CNFs and cloud infrastructure.

GitOps-based Operation


Data management and software lifecycling in future AI driven networks
: Advanced AI capabilities and ML algorithms support closed loop RAN automation. Networks look after themselves in terms of performance optimization, service assurance and end-user experience by continuously monitoring and adjusting their behavior. Intent-based operations intuitively translate service provider defined business intents into networks policies and actions.

A fundamental component of this process is Machine Learning Operations (MLOps). In RAN, ML models can generate predictions on various time scales, including fast control loops (very low latency) and slow control loops. In fast control loops, ML algorithms can be embedded directly into RAN functions to make rapid decisions, often with microseconds or milliseconds. But in slow control loops, centralized automation enhances network-level improvement through rApps, where more time is available to make complex decisions such as cell-shaping.

An effective ML algorithm requires access to a valid dataset and training to predict unseen data. Well-maintained and secure data pipelines, through a set of telco-tailored MLOps service enabler can be implemented within the CSP domain. The MLOps type of services offer a comprehensive suite of tools and services to manage the complete lifecycle of machine learning models, such as re-training, deployment, and monitoring models.

Automated RAN acceptance testing and monitoring solution: As 5G and beyond, the Radio Access Network becomes increasingly complex and feature-rich, lab acceptance testing and monitoring solution must use automation technology and progressively incorporate AI/ML to minimize software validation duration, maximizing testing performance and improving field operation efficiency.

Automated testing is a strategic move and a game-changer for CSPs toward a more efficient lab verification process. The only viable path for successful and sustainable Operations transformation is a continuous framework that includes multi-vendor and end-to-end testing after software delivery from each vendor.

Automated testing also improves testing lead times dramatically, giving CSPs the confidence to plan for the roll-out of new versions more often. The ecosystem needs to centralize the activities and ensure that the testing scope of the CSP’s lab is kept optimized.

4. A Call to Action: Embrace Service Transformation in Agile RAN Operations

RAN operation automation and streamlined process must be integrated in the RAN segment to support use cases such as automated network configuration, automated acceptance testing, accelerate network updates, dynamic and on demand autoscaling of CNF resources and many more.

CSPs are increasingly transforming their networks toward cloud-native and disaggregated architectures, which demand more sophisticated and advanced scenarios for software validation. Consequently, having better efficiency in verification cycles becomes an almost inevitable result of network diversification and openness.

Implementing a fully automated software LCM approach with CI/CDD process for a continuous delivery of new features, optimizations, and software updates is essential to curb the complexity, address security threats and increase efficiency in end-to-end operation. CSPs must transform automation from best-effort network deployment to differentiated common automation approach across cloud infrastructure and CNFs.

Automated RAN acceptance testing and monitoring solution

Transforming network operations toward a cloud native automation paradigm


Key takeaways:

The evolution of the lifecycle management model, aligned with the technological advancements and increase in automation, can provide a competitive advantage beyond just reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). It can also enhance business agility and create new revenue streams.

  • Improved Network Performance & Reliability: Automated and seamless RAN operation enables CSPs to offer an improved and consistent experience to subscribers, which enhances operator’s revenue prospect. Reliability and stability are an uncompromised principle of every network and automation play a key role in mitigating human-error operation.
  • Enhanced Security:Open interfaces in RAN raise security concerns as they can be viewed as both more secure and more vulnerable to attacks. By automating compliance checks, CI/CDD and GitOps streamline rigorous verification to take prompt action against security threats and events.
  • Operational Cost and Efficiency: Automation reduces operational costs associated with the software acceptance, deployment, and optimization process. Using automation in acceptance process gives huge gain. It also minimizes the risk of human errors.
The Ericsson Blog

Like what you’re reading? Please sign up for email updates on your favorite topics.

Subscribe now

At the Ericsson Blog, we provide insight to make complex ideas on technology, innovation and business simple.