RAKUTEN SYMPHONY
MOBILE AS A SOFTWARE : IT ’ S ALL ABOUT THE LAYERS
With this software-centric approach ,
Rabih Dabboussi emphasises that though “ hardware isn ’ t eliminated , it is standardised on common commodity hardware ”, describing it as functioning in a way similar to Lego , with moveable , interlocking layers being stacked on top of each other .
Platform Infrastructure layer – open commodity compute systems that Rakuten call “ the servers ” and Open RAN radio units .
“ The foundation of your network is this commodity-based hardware , which immediately solves the problem of being locked into monolithic proprietary systems , because now you ' re using off-the-shelf compute systems that can come from numerous different vendors around the world .”
top of it , unify the operating system . So we use one single operating system , which is a containerised Kubernetes operating system .”
Open RAN and core network functions layer – “ On top of that comes your logic , your network functions , which is all cloud-native software , including Open RAN Distributed Unit ( DU ) and Centralised Unit , and all core network functions .
“ Now you need to manage the network . And again , because everything becomes software , it ' s much easier for us to build in a unified , abstract way in an observability framework to do config management , performance management , fault monitoring – all the dashboarding , the monitoring and the control of your network .”
Cloud layer – “ On top of the foundation , you need the layer that aggregates all of this hardware and makes it look as a pool of compute resources , storage resources and networking resources available for you . That layer is called the cloud layer or the virtualisation layer , which is where you start getting into the software .
“ We made a conscious decision from the beginning to unify the cloud , and then , on
Operations layer – “ Here , adjacent to this , you need to plan , build , and operate the network while managing customers . The cloud-native Symworld Platform streamlines the complex mesh of support systems and custom integrations that all operators have accumulated . This helps telecom operators scale faster as the cloud sets the pace for speed , innovation , and network expectations .”
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46 March 2023