Enea together with ten world-class vendors in a project led by Telenor, developed an innovative end-to-end automated deployment solution with 5G Standalone (SA) Core. The solution substantially accelerates the deployment time of a network slice from days to minutes, increasing the deployment speed by 70%.

The unique multi-vendor approach led by Telenor involved key network functions from Enea (Stratum Network Data Layer, Subscription Manager), as well as Oracle and Casa Systems.  The purpose is to both reduce deployment time and to allow enterprises to order 5G network services dynamically and have a proven path to on-board their own application services via standard APIs.

The solution integrated an orchestration system from Nokia & Red Hat, security monitoring from Palo Alto Networks, and network monitoring  from Emblasoft. The 5G SA core was connected with multiple radio access nodes from Huawei and Ericsson. All services ran on Red Hat  OpenShift on Intel and was based on Nokia and HPE hardware. More detail is provided in the Telenor Research and Innovation update.

‘The need for speed’ is the name of the game when telcos are moving rapidly towards cloud-native virtualized networks to speed up the deployment process.  This will improve operational efficiency and scalability, critical for telcos to succeed in the years to come. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform onboards services easily with playbooks whereas the Cloud Operations Manager onboards services described in helm charts. The innovative integration automates the deployment of 5G network services as well as the deployment of application services and value-added services like security functions or testing and validation tools.

As noted the purpose of this is to not only accelerate deployment time but to allow enterprises to order and deploy 5G network services; onboarding their own application services in a much more effective way via the proven APIs, helm charts and automation exposed by the orchestration systems. Enea’s network functions provide the capability for both Data Layer (Stratum UDR) and Subscription Manager (UDM, AUSF) to store data securely and robustly. It can flexibly access the data (standard 3GPP Service Based Interfaces) and establish user identity and authentication swiftly and securely.

Enea’s components combine in standard architecture with the core components from Oracle and Casa Systems. All services run on Red Hat OpenShift, enterprise Kubernetes platform, agnostic to the hardware supplied. Integrating with the orchestration layer, these can be deployed in both Virtual Machine (VM) and Container options to provide maximum flexibility.

These features help Telenor and its partners to enhance the customer experience with shortened service deployment time through an accelerated and automated deployment process in a true, proven, multi-vendor environment.

Update from Telenor February 2024

Click here for more information on Enea‘s Network Functions

Stratum Network Data Layer

Subscription Manager