Why Isn’t your 5G RAN Transport Versatile and Environment friendly?

5G companies can’t succeed with out versatile, environment friendly, and programmable transport. To assist and capitalize on 5G companies, 5G RAN transport architectures have developed to assist virtualization and slicing, strict latency, jitter, stringent synchronization, and multi-cloud interconnect architectures. Current Cisco improvements have centered on section routing and IPv6 to enhance community reliability with site visitors engineering and to simplify community complexity with programmable transport, offering 5G transport operators with extra management and the flexibility to construct performance-based service degree agreements (SLAs).

SRv6 microSID for converged private and non-private 5G

A virtualized radio entry community (RAN) structure permits operators to quickly and flexibly allocate sources throughout private and non-private 5G deployments. To speed up time to market and bridge the abilities hole, communication service suppliers (CSPs) are selecting to deploy their companies in partnership with hyperscale cloud suppliers (HCPs). Moreover, as knowledge facilities transfer from centralized to distributed to extend protection and scale back potential efficiency points with cloud-based companies, an agile and scalable transport community is important as a part of a hybrid or multi-cloud technique.

Versatile service placement requires site visitors engineering and end-to-end service high quality assurance from the transport community. As effectively, transport slicing is important to keep up assured service high quality and supply RAN service differentiation.

Slice consciousness between the radio and the 5G core community is addressed by 3GPP specs. To pick probably the most optimum person aircraft operate (UPF) calls for, the underlying transport community should even be slice conscious. Particular slice traits are depending on the underlay 5G transport and the way it allocates sources. The community can examine slice info just like the VLAN or ethernet header, classify the radio site visitors to totally different slices, and allocate transport sources to fulfill various ranges of service from latency delicate to finest effort.

SRv6 excels when the community has many interconnected finish factors and complicated site visitors engineering necessities. It brings programmability to the 5G transport structure. The packet processing program is expressed as an inventory of directions that are represented as 128-bit segments referred to as section identifier (SID). In complicated site visitors engineering, there are eventualities that will require carrying a number of segments within the IPv6 packet headers. Lowering this overhead is helpful to attenuate the packet most switch unit (MTU) and allow SRv6 on legacy {hardware} units with restricted processing capabilities.

The microSID (uSID) introduces extensions to the SRv6 programming mannequin with every 16-byte SID capable of carry micro-instructions referred to as uSID. uSID are represented with two bytes, and as much as six uSIDs might be carried in a SID.

SRv6 uSID advantages

With SRv6 uSID, the community might be programmed to deal with complicated eventualities with simplicity. This extra programmability comes with a number of benefits:

• No change to SRv6 management aircraft, knowledge aircraft, or section routing header (SRH)
• Any SID within the SID checklist can carry a uSID
• An SID can carry as much as six program directions
• No routing extension required to assist

The result’s an ultra-scalable community capable of assist multi-domain deployments with minimal MTU overhead.

SRv6 microSID and O-RAN ALLIANCE Plugfest

Cisco partnered with Keysight Applied sciences to efficiently validate O-RAN ALLIANCE-specified 5G RAN site visitors on an SRv6 microSID-based programmable 5G xHaul transport community. Site visitors traits like latency, jitter, synchronization, and community convergence had been measured for every service slice over a multihop ring topology structure.

Within the validation check, latency delicate fronthaul management aircraft site visitors was carried with an SRv6-uSID-based L2 transport slice over EVPN. Non-latency delicate administration site visitors was carried with an SRv6 uSID-based L3 transport slice over L3VPN. Synchronization was supplied by an aggregation router to all nodes together with radio items and distributed items. The Keysight Novus tester was used to simulate a number of radio items and distributed items, whereas the Keysight Metronome Timing System (MTS) was used to measure synchronization accuracy and relative timing.

SRv6 microSID directions programmed the community to make sure service assurance for every slice and site visitors kind with the next outcomes:

• Latency delicate slice: 11us and common jitter of ~600ns
• Non-latency delicate slice: 28ns
• Relative timing accuracy between radio nodes: <30ns relative |TE|
• Service convergence throughout transport hyperlink failure: <22ms

These outcomes verify that the 5G xHaul structure with SRv6 microSID meets all traits outlined by eCPRI, O-RAN, ITU-T, and 3GPP requirements for fronthaul, midhaul, and backhaul site visitors over converged multihop transport structure.

Conclusion

SRv6 microSID is an open standards-based answer that many service suppliers have already deployed of their community and are realizing the advantages of such innovation. The Cisco Converged SDN Transport structure and the scalable SRv6 connects cellular customers, units, sensors, utility workloads, and cloud companies to allow CSPs to handle complicated community interconnects and undertake a hybrid cloud structure to supply differentiated companies.

Extra Assets

O-RAN ALLIANCE Plugfest Validation of WG9 xHaul with Keysight

MPLS WC 2022 – Rakuten: SRv6 uSID in Deployment to Ship Finish-to-end 5G Community Slicing

Phase Routing

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