Home > Communication Service Provider Solutions > Enabling Telecom Transformation > Advantages of CI/CD for 5G Open RAN Networks > CI/CD in the context of Open RAN
Disaggregation of the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), as per O-RAN [4] and 3GPP [5], promotes the full virtualization and cloudification of the 5G RAN components. Each RAN network function (NF) of the Centralized Unit–User Plane (CU-UP), Centralized Unit–Control Plane (CU-CP) and Distributed Unit (DU), including NF subcomponents, and other O-RAN components such as RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs), can be implemented as Containerized Network Functions (CNFs).
Containerization makes it possible to move away from traditional integrated RAN monoliths, which are designed, developed, and delivered using a Waterfall methodology. Critical drawbacks of Waterfall include inflexibility to adapt to changing requirements, long lead times for feature and bug fix delivery, changing/overtaking new features, and longer development and release cycles. CNFs, in contrast, leverage the same Agile practices and CI/CD tooling that web scale and hyperscale cloud companies have benefited from. Hence it follows that O-RAN networks can fully exploit the advantages of CI/CD.
With cloud-native CI/CD, implemented as CNFs, it is possible to make changes to microservices or containers through independent delivery pipelines with minimal disruption to the overall RAN system. CI/CD offers further efficiencies in feature delivery, as compared to integrated RAN monoliths. For example, RAN NFs including CU-UP, CU‑CP, DU, and their subcomponents, can be set up and delivered through independent CI/CD pipelines (Figure 4).
Advantages of CI/CD when combined with cloudification of RAN NFs include:
CSPs could potentially use O-RAN components from multiple vendors – CI/CD offers CSPs a fast, frequent, automatic, and reliable pipeline for software releases from different vendors. CI/CD coupled with containerization reduces the cost of fixing defects caught later in the pipeline; for example, in a non-CI/CD development cycle, problems discovered only during the manual integration of software from different vendors. CI/CD also reduces risk and increases quality of the overall RAN system, decreases time to market of new RAN features, and leads to improved customer experience. Continuous and automatic feedback loops integral to CI/CD ensure much closer collaboration between RAN vendors that develop and build the RANs and the CSPs that deploy and operate them, to mitigate lapses in software quality and to achieve greater efficiencies in delivering RAN features.