 Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our session on the radio intelligent controller at the open network in a net summit of the Linux Foundation. I'm constant in polychronopolis with juniper and I'm pleased to introduce Francisco better known as Paco Martin Pina telly. Paco is a Vodafone executive with more than 22 years of experience in every aspect of the network, having served as a key driver on the radio on the core on the transport also in various capacities. However, over the last almost five, six years, Paco has been one of the leaders of open radio access networks, the orange alliance major contributor, and heading the Vodafone activities in that respect. So we're very pleased to have Paco here who will share with us Vodafone's plans, thoughts and projections about Oran and in 5G and not only. Thank you Paco, over to you. Thank you for something. Yes, it's Paco Martin here. I am head of open running Vodafone. It used to be radio product, but we recently decided to change the name from radio product to open run, because our vision is that all the radio will be open so we are working on that. So we started actually this project about five years ago, initially focused on, on just cost but then this opportunity of radio control came up so so I'm standing standing the scope and looking forward to having the conversation here. Thank you very Paco so in this sessions in this session we're going to, to have Paco present again Vodafone's plants and activities around the radio intelligent controller. That will be followed by juniper's introduction of the radio intelligent controller and our activities in Oran. The session will be followed by a few questions that we're going to ask Paco and see where Vodafone is getting in this very important segment of 5G. Paco, please go ahead with your presentation. So first point to note is that when we started open run, there were a few areas that were the initial target. First of all, there was an idea of changing the ecosystem and making sure that there was a model, a way to do radio that was different from before that wasn't including some of the problems of traditional radio including a vendor lock in the fact that you deploy a network with a supplier and then it's difficult to change that supplier so so that was one of the ideas as well as enriching the ecosystem with multiple, multiple suppliers. We also thought that the open run model could be a way to boost innovation, initially focused on cost. So we have a number of initiatives around white box solutions and around improving the radio with the baseband including common of the shell hardware. Those are targeted technology evolutions, but we somehow had also in mind the opportunity doing something different than new architecture. And that is what is the topic for conversation today, the main one is radio intelligent controller and what it can mean for Vodafone and for the overall industry as a main change. We have this chart that shows the traditional way of doing things and then the new, the new architecture that it's been put forward by Oran where we have the chance of building a platform in the same way as we had the mobile systems for example with the OSS from Apple or from Android then you can build on top those applications that can run either in real time or in near real time delivering a service delivering the possibility to tailor your radio service in different ways. So this opportunity increases on one hand the potential for new revenue but at the same time gives you the flexibility and another way of getting efficiencies thanks to your applications and that's something we're going to be discussing later. If we look at the evolution, how do we think things are going to be unfolding and we have some in the network, the mobile network about five years ago. So it's, it's, it's now implemented everywhere, things like anomaly detections or or A&R, or, or basic optimization done in an automatic way. The, the, the, the first path for radio intelligent control applications is somehow replicating those functionalities, but implemented in a, in the rig platform. And we are already there. Actually, I think we are already moving to the next one, which is more about being able to use in real time. Some of the resource management, regular resource management system and functionality we have in the radio so being able to handle in real time traffic or, or enhancing multi-user mime of informing. We are, we are, I think at that level now in terms of algorithms that we know are going to work. Those will be ported in the informal applications on this rig platform. But ultimately, the opportunity for a rig can come thanks to applications tailored to specific industries or specific functionalities, specific areas. For example, what energy saving coming one of them, but if we think about the opportunity for, for different industries, we can have imagine a company in the, in the automotive sector, and imagine a player that is normally not in the software of the radio, like one of those big big big companies, Accenture or Capgemini or some, some, some of those, they know the automotive sector very well. They know how to do programming. If it comes to the standard of rig and an organ, you can, you know how to build applications, then you can capture the opportunity. You know your customers, you know what they require, you know how to build software, then you do it. But that's kind of the opportunity, eventually, where the different new players will come in and will play in an area that was captured before that was not available for, for, for everybody. If we take some time, we know that Rick is still standardized, but we are pretty sure that this is the, this is the journey. So, hopefully, in a couple of years from now, we'll see those applications starting to flourish and, and the, the, the opportunity will start to be, to be captured. It's important as well that we as an industry we, we push, and we set the right framework for, for everything. So apart from preparing the opportunity, you need to be able to take it forward, you need to be able to do it. And, and I think we have two main actors here in the, in the area of specifications and taking things to market. One is the Oran Alliance that is defined in working group two and working with three how Rick should be working. And then we, we have also the telecom infra project with the radio intelligence and automation group that's working on making this happen is working on, on developing the applications and, and, and defining the use cases and, and, and enabling the first, the first opportunity. So we now need more companies stepping in and preparing some, some initial applications and trial and then, and then, and then making this, making this happen. But I think the ground is already prepared. And as we progress in the standardization then things will start to happen. But we know that there are there are some challenges to do this. So one comes in the way of specifications. So we, we need to make sure we will run fast in this cycle of defining a specification, a testing finding issues, feeding that back into the original specification work. Though all these needs to happen faster as it needs to happen that we certified the initial solutions and that we, that we prove that things things can work. Open run is just, it's an accident ecosystem. We obviously need to accelerate the implementation in the traditional radio of this opportunity, some of the big, big radio supplies are very embracing Rick. So that's fantastic news. Probably they will have a very, very important role to play to make it successful, but it's important that they, they come into open run, ultimately, but in particular in, in this week space where for sure they will be very valuable to the users from day one. And as we evolve into a new architecture, not only restricted to read but overall in general we need to make sure that we are covering all the security aspects. So, so that's obviously one of the challenges and one of the key key areas that we have to focus on. And obviously, one of the key key points of focus is how do we ensure that this system can work. And for example, I mean, we can all picture in our head the challenge of, you know, having multiple applications, accessing at the same time to, to, in the in very real way to do something like the radio scheduler. How do you handle those don't request when it's multiple applications that want to have, you know, and access at the same time to this very, very sensitive part of our radio. So there's, there are some technical challenges we need to tackle. But we know what those are, and we know that we need to start, start playing, start, start developing and deploying a grid so that we, we fix them as we encounter them. We have covered the opportunity but the reality is that we are already there doing some of the initial steps in the journey for Rick. We are happy to be already trialing our first implementation with Juniper in Turkey and parallel wireless. This is a solution that fits somehow with what I was saying before that it's a self optimizing network functionalities now implemented in Greek because we're talking about 4G admission control here, but it's a very important proof point for the overall platform. It's a very important step to make sure that we can run this type of system on a conversion commercial environment. We, we have to go through standardization but the journey has started in particular we are I think, a little bit even even more ahead in the journey than that because we have already tried and tested in in our labs. Another system that includes other, other suppliers the some big ones like VMware Intel or Capgemini and also Cohere who are providing algorithms already that can be integrated into Rick applications. In the case of Cohere is helping us to improve, improve capacity thanks to a better channel estimation. And in the future we we know that we can even improve the system much more and we have some cool ideas out there. So for example imagine the, the, imagine what happens with a car you get it that this is a tune to some generic settings, but we know that we can modify them and get more power out of it or get more speed out of it. Similarly, similar thing can be done with the hardware. So you could run some radio and telecommunications applications on top of your hardware and get, get a modified version of modified performance for that hardware depending on what you want. It can be the energy or more energy efficiency or different, different rate of performance so we, we are willing to do that as well and it's a bit of a long shot but we started to work on those type of applications so we, we fully captured the opportunity for for Rick. So this is my presentation today I hope you liked it and looking for what you questioned and the presentation from Consonant. Thank you. Again, thank you very much Paco for the forward looking inspiring presentation. It's great to see where Vodafone is heading and share your thoughts. Thank you to each and give a view now will continue basically, you know, on the radio intelligence controller, and I will give a summary of the activities we have the solutions, we have built at Juniper on the radio intelligence and controller and northern. And, and, you know, share some of the thoughts that go beyond the trial at Vodafone with parallel wireless and Juniper. Again, you know as Paco outline, we are already engaged in a, in a trial at Vodafone in a multi vendor setup where we partner with parallel wireless, which provides the virtualized bbq the agency, hng gateway and the RMS and is fully connected with the Juniper near near real time and on your real time Rick. The initial focus is going to to be select x ups, specifically admission control, which works, not just in 5G but we're going to demonstrate here the ability to do so in a 4G network with that's that's at Vodafone. And in principle, you know, as long as the virtualized the radio can provide the necessary pms and the necessary interfaces, either, you know, or an e2 interfaces or even proprietary interfaces. So a radio intelligence controller and Rick can bring the benefits of management of the radio resources dynamic management to pretty much any virtualized any software driven radio, even though the focus is primarily on 5G. So that's exactly what we're demonstrating at Vodafone in partnership with parallel wireless and Juniper. So let's take a step back and look at the radio intelligence controller in a more, you know, general way. If we really think where we were up until 4G, where the radio was built out of proprietary appliances. And it was extremely difficult to upgrade the radio. Sometimes you had to really, you know, lift physical boxes out of the, you know, radio sites and do upgrades or replacement, etc. All that is the old way of doing business right as we move to fully software defined radios driven by the or an architecture. Now we have the possibility of truly programmatically defined use cases on the radio without having to touch any physical resource. I like to use the analogy of operating systems to CPU use right so I call, you know, the RIC is is to the run what the operating system is to the CPU if we really think about it. That's exactly the right type of analogy, or the hypervisor to the virtual machine. Right the radio intelligence controller. Essentially gives opens up the radio to applications and provides the means to manage low level radio resources to allocate them across different users across different devices and manage the way the spectrum is shared among competing use cases. It's a very powerful paradigm that allows us now to build new applications applications that can come in the form of son as a next up running on the near real time Rick, as well as applications that are AI ML driven and leverage trends that historical trends in the network to provision radio resources ahead of time as the need arises. In addition to that of course applications like load balancing traffic steering, massive MIMO, etc, we'll talk about other possibilities for x apps, bring new value to the radio, new ways of managing the radio and therefore building applications that not only drive optimization new ways of addressing optimization the radio, but also opens up the possibility for new business models that drive revenue generation as well. So it's really the new way of thinking about the radio, as well as the rest of the resources in a software centric software driven approach. We have managed to do so across the entire infrastructure, the radio was the last bastion and orange enables us now to really bring software driven architectures to the most critical component of 5G and not only 5G. Juniper, of course we're building, not just the platform, we're addressing also key aspects of the architecture that have to do with the way x apps potentially can interfere with each other, trying to manage or reconfigure the same type of resource. We address those we address the mitigation. So we enable third party applications also to run on our rig, leveraging our SDK that exposes common pms to x apps for example addresses conflict resolution and mitigation and provides a very flexible way of sharing pms in the case performance, keep performance indicators across different x apps. So certifying x apps, as well as addressing conflict resolution are key components of the platform on top of that we're building a host of x apps in partnership with other technology companies, as well as homegrown within Juniper in our customer operate operators. And these are, you know, this fall in three large buckets the personalized service experience type of x apps and our apps revenue stream, generating x apps, opening up new business models, as well as complex and complex reduction. I like very much what Paco presented in, in the use cases where his position was that, you know, the rig enables now domain expert expert entities to build their own x apps. For example, if, if I recall, of Accenture or Cap Gemini for example, that have a lot of expertise on the automobile industry industry right to build to leverage the rig to build domain specific x apps that will be, you know, needed down the path by that segment of industry, and we can repeat the same concept across different industry verticals enterprise verticals. So a very powerful model. But perhaps the most complex and in my view and the view of many, the most complex ex up and our app is the one that drives network slicing, and what is network slicing. By now everybody knows, taking essentially today's networks that look at everything in the same way you know every every device every use case is treated in exactly the same way one size fits all to where network slicing is going to take us where the network provides specialized SLAs and even applications to each different device, different use case, different user for that matter, right so the notion of network slicing allows us to build now. Essentially, purpose built networks that address specific use cases on the same physical infrastructure, a very powerful model that enables not only the industry for that all use cases, but also opens up the possibility to potentially offer private mobile networks through the operator infrastructure as well, we'll talk a bit more about that. So if we look at network slicing one of the critical components is the ability to bring up a network slice in an end to end fashion so the radio is the most complex use case of course. And that was elusive so far because it was closed or an opens up the radio the radio intelligent controller enables now any application to access even resource management hooks into the radio and tailor them to the needs of the application. And of course the Rick is the arbitrator of how resources are shared dynamically across different tendencies different slices. In doing so, of course, the run domain orchestrator is the critical component that brings up not only the infrastructure, but leveraging the near real time Rick and the non real time Rick can build again use case specific slices. So given that the Rick has global view of the radio resources and the, you know, use of the radio resource at any given time. It also has the ability to do things that are not possible without the radio intelligent controller for example, we can build an end to end slice that has dedicated to you. Since we have now visibility of all the distributed units in the radio in a northern architecture, we can dedicate the you for example that share potentially the same radio with, you know, on a specific slice, and have other the use that are shared across different slices for example here. The orchestration and the stitching together of all the data plane components in a way that addresses the network slice specific requirements from the SLA point of view is key, excuse me, is key in in enabling network slicing and to end. So the first placement of the data plane components like the DQ the CU user plane CU is again dependent on the requirements, the performance requirements of each particular slice. All of that again is possible through the Rick, but is enabled by the by the run domain orchestrator. Place the components, the functional components, the next question is how do you connect them together right so the run orchestrator has to work with the transport domain orchestrator to be able to provide the appropriate connectivity and address also the necessary SLA requirements to build them to end use case and juniper focuses this is one of our, you know, main differentiators, leveraging the juniper strengths on the transport domain to be able to deliver an SLA, along with the orchestrating a network slice across, not just the order domain, but across the transfer the one connectivity, as well as the data center. This is a simple use case that relates to admission control, where the non real time Rick coordinates with a real time Rick to orchestrate different slices and manage resources PDU. In this case, on a per slice basis, dynamically. The example we use is three slices one is dedicated to general use case. Another one, let's say can be dedicated to a hospital with 200 PDU sessions. One is dedicated to that use case, or another slice that is used by a school with up to 100 PDU sessions. Now the school may not use all the previous sessions over a weekend right so Derek provides the flexibility of reallocating those to be used to another use case that maybe over the weekend may have another slice that may have more requirements right more importantly this can be done dynamically and emergency use case, which requires the hospital to, you know, to have more access to the network more PDU sessions would trigger through an external enrichment server. Dynamic allocation taken for example away from the school PDU sessions allocating them to the to the hospital. All that is possible with Eric. In summary, Juniper's focus on the Rick and then to a network slicing can be summarized here in these four broad categories. Open, we're driving for open and interoperable Rick platform, and we're happy today to claim that we are working with partners on boarding their x apps on a Rick platform in addition to building our own, you know, x apps and raps leveraging AI driven enterprise experience addressing user experience at the very core and network efficiencies leveraging AI. This is a long tradition in this space and a singular focus on AI driven enterprise using the mist and the Marvis AI engine, which is being integrated in our radio intelligent control platform. Or an alliance leadership is key, not just for Juniper but for all the technology vendors and the operators. So is one of the leaders in, you know, and contributors in the orange community as waterfall in general, many other operators obviously we are Juniper. We are the network slicing task group, no surprise there, as well as coach here the use case task group, and we are a major contributor perhaps one of the top contributors in the orange community. And we have participation in pretty much all of the working groups. And finally, a key focus for us is then to a network slice of the station. And again, I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of taking the power of the Rick on the radio, the programmable radio and stretching that capability to deliver and to the network slice with strong SLA guarantees, right and that involves the ability to enforce the SLA across several transport domains as well as several clouds that host parts of the packet core, as well as the data network that can be on the operator or in a public network. So we will switch to asking using the, you know, the benefit of having Paco with us to find out a bit more about, you know, where his his mind is and where Vodafone is heading so Paco, would you be, you know, kind to share with us. Your views about adoption of the orange architecture by Vodafone and specifically where do you see Vodafone being on the adoption side by let's say 2025 in the next four or five years. That's, that's a very good question. We are preparing ourselves to contribute more to the orange alliance and tip. I think it's very, very essential that some of the big players in the ecosystem help developing open run in a collaborative manner. So we are a big player and we are putting resources we cannot do this alone so it's very important that some of us in the vendor community, the operator community, we, we put all the focus I think where we are in 2025 and beyond will be pretty much dependent on open run, get into the right maturity which I think it's going to happen. So it will depend on the adoption, the opportunities being out there and we are already planning for more markets. We have trials in several countries with different suppliers. But this needs to happen also in other operators not just as I think lately we have seen a lot of moving in the industry. We also need to see some of the innovations really getting there. The promise is from open run so be in the cost space or here in the radio and control application space. I think it's out of question that open run is going to happen the pace of it and, and exactly the adoption is still dependent on early success. So, yeah, really looking forward to, to moving in the time machine to 2025 and seeing where we are, but I think it's going to be, it's going to be a big, big, big opportunity for open run. Thank you Paco. How do you see a network slicing, you know, when we get to the point where we really can deliver network slicing in an end to end fashion of course with the order that you know the rig playing a key role on the radio. Do you see, you know, network slicing being part of your strategy for offering private mobile network services. Do you think that is going to play a role at BodaPhone. What's your perspective. Yeah, I think, I think there is no doubt in that we used to try and implement the similar ideas to slicing in the past in 4G and before but it's now with 5G that this is really possible. And I think what we see with the rig is an opportunity to take this to an extreme and have no limits on what you can do, right. Yeah, I think it's going to be happening. I think if we are fair, I think that up to date it is still a little bit of work being done on the actual use cases and some of them are clear, some of them are not, but I think the foundation and the flexibility that's required is going to be there and and for sure it will be used. Sometimes you develop a basic functionality or flexibility option and then later we have seen that in many technological breakthroughs, right. So that's, that, that makes a lot of sense, I agree. You know, I've been accused of being focusing too much on network slicing which is really, you know, I take the accusation, you know, guilty as charged. Back to network slicing. I would love to have a crystal ball and try to see when operators are going to start adopting network slicing. But let me ask the question, you know, in a in a simpler form. And what's your opinion about when network slicing is going to become a must have in files in networks, and initially it may be only on those three slices that, you know, 3GPP has, has essentially mandated the URL see the enhanced mobile band and the machine to machine but there are opportunities for in between. But do you see any of them becoming sort of a mandate in the networks and if so by when I think the, the market will dictate as far as we see opportunities and, you know, commercial rollouts and that will trigger and be via the foundation for for that, you know, capability being implemented and as a must right so when this is going to happen in a year, maybe, I would, I would say not not way more than that. I think it's a, we are seeing, we are seeing a 5G rollouts, having a more and more the development and deployment of standalone networks and and the full 5G is becoming available and as such, you know, slicing will happen so I'd say a year no more than that. That's music to my ears, and I'm sure to the ears of many of our attendees. Finally Paco, how, you know, for for many of these, you know, forward looking capabilities in the network it's going to take several, you know, technology vendors to work together right. For example, for example, and of course, operators are going to be the catalyst the critical component in enforcing the hand of, especially the large, you know, vendors to work with innovative, you know, you know, companies in the space to really deliver this promise of software even everything right in 5G. Do you see operators like Vodafone global, you know, tier one operators becoming more active in forcing the hand of, you know, the large vendors to say, you know, you've got to work with XYZ to bring this value to me. I mean, I see that happening but my hope is that this becomes naturally the way of working I think the new model is by default is by design is collaborative so and I hope that happens naturally and that we all find the right incentives to play. And that's, that's a high note to to end our presentation. And that's definitely a great wish. Thank you so much Paco. And thank, thank you very much to all, all of the participants. We look forward to seeing you hopefully in the next, you know, the next time face to face when our world will be in a better shape. Goodbye. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.