O-RAN Lifecycle Management on OpenStack Tacker

OpenStack resolves many challenge even in container era and RAN. Tacker is contributing to telecom usecase to O-RAN SC which is a collaboration between the O-RAN ALLIANCE and Linux Foundation aiming to achieve a solution to unify and accelerate the evolution in the RAN. Many telco and vendor companies has joined to the community for expanding their usecases including autonomative and intelligent system management.

Tacker is a Generic VNF Manager designed for managing lifecycle of RAN components and enables user to deploy network functions on OpenStack or Kubernetes for scalability and availability. Performance/fault management of are the key features of VNFM for running large scale virtualized network systems, but still not enough for strict requirements of vRAN such as managing heavy traffic load or energy efficiency on complex network.

In the current O-RAN SC model, Tacker manages network functions as a part of Deployment Management Service (DMS) with StarlingX. Tacker triggers operations such as registering software images on StarlingX for autonomous deployment. We'll share the future loadmap of the multi-community collaboration and the recent result of PoC at O-RAN Plugfest.