Wind River delivers Studio for NTT DOCOMO’s 5G vRAN base stations

For the launch of NTT DOCOMO’s first vRAN commercial service, Wind River Studio Cloud Platform was integrated with Fujitsu’s virtualised central unit (vCU) and virtualised distributed unit (vDU) with the latest NVIDIA-converged accelerator. Studio Cloud Platform provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source software, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale.

“The industry is increasingly moving toward vRAN and Open RAN, given compelling benefits such as network flexibility and scalability and reduced deployment and maintenance costs. By working with proven experts such as Wind River, Fujitsu, and NVIDIA, we are observing commercial-level feature support and quality and can help transform the industry and accelerate innovation to meet the needs of an evolving telecom landscape,” said Sadayuki Abeta, global head of Open RAN Solutions, NTT DOCOMO.

“Distributed cloud networks are highly complex. It will be essential to innovate to ease deployment and increase levels of automation and operational efficiency so that service providers can successfully support new 5G use cases,” said Paul Miller, chief technology officer, Wind River. “Working closely with leaders such as NTT DOCOMO, Fujitsu, and NVIDIA, Wind River can continue to deliver proven technology based on Studio that is live with operators in global deployments.”

“Fujitsu is delivering fully virtualised 5G base station software that can help customers achieve ultra-low latency services and highly optimised TCO. We look forward to continuing our work with NTT DOCOMO, Wind River, and NVIDIA to grow innovation for next-generation networks,” said Masaki Taniguchi, senior vice president, head of Mobile Systems Business Unit, Fujitsu.

“By working with industry leaders NTT DOCOMO, Wind River, and Fujitsu, NVIDIA is helping to deliver high-performance, power-efficient, software-defined 5G vRAN and AI applications in an all-in-one, commercial off-the-shelf, NVIDIA-accelerated system,” said Ronnie Vasishta, senior vice president of Telecoms at NVIDIA. “This technology can help enable innovative new use cases for a spectrally efficient 5G network.”

Wind River provides both its Studio Cloud Platform and Studio Analytics capabilities to NTT DOCOMO. Studio Cloud Platform, based on the open source StarlingX project, delivers a foundation for a geographically distributed, managed solution able to simplify Day 1 and Day 2 operations by providing single-pane-of-glass, zero-touch, automated management of thousands of nodes, no matter their physical location. Studio Analytics can be used to monitor the status of geographically distributed far-Edge clouds. Studio addresses the complex challenges service providers face in deploying and managing geographically distributed, low latency infrastructure and enables large-scale deployment of 5G virtualised base stations.