Powering Private 5G using NiralOS™ 5G Core and 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor
Niral Networks provides tailored private 5G and Edge solutions to empower enterprises to accelerate their operational effectiveness. Our offerings include NiralOS™, a modular Network Operating System featuring the 5G Packet Core, Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) Platform, and the SDN Controller.
NiralOS™ private 5G and Edge is used across various industries and use cases, leveraging the high-speed, low latency, real-time, secured, and reliable connectivity of 5G technology to enable innovation, automation and digitization of applications and processes while maintaining complete control over the network infrastructure. NiralOS™ operates efficiently on commodity hardware and seamlessly integrates with third-party radio systems and edge applications, simplifying multi-site network and edge infrastructure provisioning and management through a unified dashboard.
Intel provides the perfect compute and networking platform for Niral Networks to launch Private 5G and Edge solution. NiralOS™ 5G Packet Core, Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) Platform and the SDN Controller has been integrated to various Intel processor including its latest 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor and Intel Ethernet Controller.
Integrated Solution – Smart Manufacturing
NiralOS™ 5G Core in Intel Lab
NiralOS™ 5G Performance Setup at Intel Lab
For testing the performance and scalability of NiralOS™ private 5G and SDN Controller, two 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® servers were connected back to back.
NiralOS™ Setup on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Server:
- One VM running the 5G Core Control Plane Functions like AMF, SMF, AUSF, PCF, NRF, UDM
- Multiple VM for UPF
- One VM running the SDN Controller
- Multiple Application VMs to run applications like iperf, httperf, video streaming
5G Radio Setup on another Server:
- Multiple 5G UE Simulation VMs
- Multiple 5G gNB Simulation VMs
Both the servers are configured with 2 x E810-2CQDA2 Intel® Network Interface Card and simulates the N2 and N3 interface between 5G gNodeB and 5G Core.
Both the servers contains Vmware ESXi as the Hypervisor and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as the host OS. Also various other tools and software like Kubernetes, SR-IOV, DPDK, VPP are used in the setup.
NiralOS™ 5G Core in Intel Lab
Multiple tests has been conducted on the NiralOS™ for various customer deployment scenarios:
- Virtualized 5G Core
- Containerized 5G Core
- Kubernetes based 5G Core
- 5G Core with linux kernel based user plane
- 5G Core with DPDK, VPP based user plane
The NiralOS™ UPF throughput measured for various deployment configurations are:
Our test validated that enabling DPDK, VPP and SR-IOV can significantly improve the performance on the Intel® Server, and we can reserve more CPU threads to scale the UPF performance to meet the customer requirement for Private 5G.
Furthermore, we created multiple instances of the 5G UE and gNB simulators in the other Intel® server and could register 10K active subscribers and transfer data simultaneously using the UPF for the 10K subscribers.
The Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8470N Processor used in the lab has total of 52 cores, 104 threads, 256 GM RAM and 800GB SSD. So, a single server can meet a typical Private 5G customer requirement of 10K active subscribers and 40 Gbps aggregated throughput and still have multiple CPU threads available for running the Edge Compute and application use cases.
Multiple NiralOS™ Private 5G and 5G Lab deployment for customers have been powered by Intel® platform and servers.
Intel® Network Builders wants to recognize the results of Niral Networks, an Intel® Partner Alliance member and member of our network community of partners. The optimization of the NiralOS™ 5G Core on the advanced features of the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor and Intel® Ethernet Controllers showcase the benefits and power of Intel’s state of the art solution portfolio for communication services providers and enterprises. Niral Networks has worked closely with our engineers to enable their solution to address the needs of the private 5G and Edge solutions for greater performance and service assurance. We look forward to the continued advancements with Niral Networks as a member of the Intel Network Builders ecosystem program.
We deployed NiralOS™ 5G Core at Intel Lab and performed rigorous testing on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8470N Processor with DPDK, VPP, SR-IOV features enabled and achieved almost 5x gain in UPF performance. The NiralOS™ 5G Core was effortlessly able to handle 10,000 active subscribers and achieve an aggregated throughput of 40 Gbps that is typically required for Private 5G deployments. Intel® also provided us a platform for multiple party integration where NiralOS™ 5G Core was integrated with 3rd party Policy Control Function for intelligent, flexible and scalable of 5G Policy Enforcement and Monetization solution.