Rakuten Mobile Network uses Red Hat technologies for creation of network of mobile communication

On February 27, 2019 the company Red Hat announced that Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile Network it uses Red Hat technologies for creation of network mobile communication which start is planned for October, 2019. This completely virtualized network will allow Rakuten Mobile Network to react more quickly to customer needs and to be prepared for full-scale start of technologies 5G. Rakuten Mobile Network develops the mobile network relying not on possibilities of the specialized hardware, and on cloud technologies.

Entering the Japanese mobile communications market of Rakuten Mobile Network it wanted not only to be prepared for arrival of a 5G, but also to accelerate providing mobile services using innovations in the field of software. Therefore the company decided to build the flexible infrastructure of telecommunication network scaled by cloud-native which would allow to provide effectively needs of end users when preserving low operating costs.

"Not nonflexible proprietary solutions, but cloud computing with the open code become a basis of the next generation of mobile networks. Many mobile services, from a 5G to augmented reality, very often are based based on the open source software working "iron", constructed on the basis of open standards. Red Hat helped Rakuten Mobile Network not only to design network of the next generation, but also to set the standard of how open cloud-native of the solution can define an appearance of a mobile network". Chris Wright, vice president and technical director of Red Hat

Together with Red Hat the Rakuten Mobile Network company created a cloud of NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) in which network functions are implemented not using the specialized equipment and the proprietary software, and work in the virtualized environments from servers of general purpose. At the same time the following Red Hat technologies are used:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the single, reliable and protected OS level platform
• Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the scalable IaaS platform
• Red Hat Ceph Storage as software-defined storage system.

According to representatives of Red Hat, the cloud principle of the organization of mobile services will allow Rakuten Mobile Network to offer a number of consumer and commercial services, including:

• Fast mobile Internet
• Services of a radio access network of a 5G (according to information on mart2019 year expects obtaining the license)
• Services of NB-IoT network (Narrow Band Internet of Things)
• Video streaming and other multimedia services
• Services of augmented and virtual reality

The NFV cloud of Rakuten Mobile Network includes all components of infrastructure, from servers in the central data center to computing systems on the network periphery which integration was provided by Cisco Systems company. Using technologies of peripheral calculations (edge computing), the Japanese operator can unroll services in close proximity to end users for decrease in delays and quality improvement of work in an expedited manner. Besides, Rakuten Mobile Networks intends to use advantages of technology of virtual networks of a radio access of vRAN developed by Altiostar Networks company in combination with the Red Hat OpenStack platform programmatically to create mobile services in a cloud environment. vRAN will be applied in services of a mobile radio access both on servers of general purpose, and in the components located directly on radio towers that it will allow Rakuten Mobile Network company to be prepared for arrival of a 5G along with rendering services 4G.

"Our purpose consisted in building network in which the speed of innovations completely is defined by the software, and scaling speed – only cloud opportunities. Our strategy of creation of systems relies on end-to-end automation of network and services. Red Hat technologies with the open code give the chance to achieve such automation and autoscaling, allowing us to work more productively and to provide to our clients cost-efficient services". Tareq Amin, technical director of Rakuten Mobile Network