Altiostar Takes Home 5G Innovation Awards From Leading Light Awards

Thanks to the COVID-19, there was no swanky ballroom party nor grip-and-grin photos for this year’s Light Reading Leading Lights awards, which were also delayed a few months because of the pandemic. But for Altiostar, the wait was worth it as we won two awards – Most Innovative 5G Technology and Most Innovative Mobile/Wireless Product or Service (with Rakuten Mobile and Intel).

The awards cap a year of success in customer deployments and new product launches that have moved Altiostar into a leadership position in Open RAN for both 4G and 5G.

The Most Innovative 5G Technology was awarded to Altiostar based on its pioneering work in developing containerized 5G Open RAN solutions that offer the ultimate flexibility to match the RAN resources with the network data flow at any moment.

In 5G, the baseband is split into centralized units (CU) and distributed units (DU). Altiostar’s container-based 5G solution further disaggregates these into micro-services. This represents a new philosophy of RAN deployments that enables networks to have just-in-time baseband capacity resulting in processing, memory and power consumption being reduced to support the average workload instead of pre-provisioning these resources for peak traffic.

The Altiostar containerized 5G architecture also intrinsically introduces control plane user plane separation (CUPS), which enables each plane to be provisioned for the traffic load. Thus containers that support IoT can be sized differently when compared to other workloads, such as enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) applications. Alternatively for ultra-reliable low latency communications (UrLLC) applications like V2x or augmented reality, the operator can deploy the user plane containers at far-edge locations.

One of the first operators to adopt this new software and approach was Rakuten Mobile, and that work was the basis of the joint Most Innovative Wireless Services award that was shared by Altiostar, Rakuten and Intel.

The container-based solution for RAN applications provides Rakuten with a flexible and modular architecture that takes a very small memory footprint, allows for rapid initialization, large scale automation, faster recovery from failures and most importantly provides the ability to deploy micro-services for various RAN functions that are all orchestrated based on the application requirements.

The server platforms that drive the virtualization technologies in Rakuten Mobile’s network are based on high-performance Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. As part of this project, Intel will release various Kubernetes plugins that facilitate RAN and MEC application containers that are deployed on Intel architecture CPUs.

We’re thankful to the Light Reading judges that reviewed our award entries and truly understood the groundbreaking nature of this software and this deployment.