Oracle and Enea announce certification of 5G Subscriber Data Management on OCI

Oracle and Enea are pleased to announce the certification of Enea’s cloud native solutions for subscriber data management, Stratum, and Data Management Applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). With this certification, Enea joins the growing ecosystem of ready-to-deploy 5G solutions on OCI, allowing customers to easily cloudify their networks in an agile and scalable manner with validated solutions.

Subscriber Management sits at the heart of any network. With Enea’s cloud native subscription management solutions, operators can quickly deploy with open, standard interfaces that provide the flexibility in building and managing service-based architectures. Stratum provides a resilient, distributed network data layer and offers the Unified Data Repository (UDR) and Unstructured Data Storage Function (UDSF). Subscription Manager solution options include the Unified Data Management (UDM) function to manage subscriber-related network procedures and the Authentication Server Function (AUSF) for UE authentication.

In collaboration with Enea, Oracle conducted certification to validate the secure deployment, configuration, and operation of Enea’s Subscriber Management solution on OCI. This validation ensures optimal functionality, performance, and interoperability. The results of our certification efforts demonstrated the following could be achieved when deploying Enea’s network functions on OCI.

• Automation and agility: The onboarding process streamlined Day 0 and Day 1 activities by automating infrastructure setup and deployment of Enea’s cloud native solutions for subscriber data management. This approach not only saved time and resources but also ensured consistency and reliability.
• Production-grade environment: Stratum and Subscription Manager were seamlessly onboarded to OCI's production-grade environment using OCI's cloud native tooling, such as Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) and Oracle Cloud Observability & Management. This robust environment empowers communications service providers (CSPs) to confidently deploy and manage Enea’s Subscriber Management solutions in real-world scenarios.
• Functional validations: Functional tests were conducted against 3GPP release 15, TS 29.540 standards to validate critical functionalities. These included 5G network procedures like registration, authorization, and mobility management, as well as UE authentication, and UE context management. Tests also evaluated their data storage capability, operation through standard 3GPP service-based interfaces.
• Performance: Performance testing, run through traffic generators, assessed the system’s throughput in transactions per second (TPS) across various loads, gauging its efficacy in operations like user registration, authentication, and data retrieval. Continuous monitoring of TPS throughout the testing phase ensured the smooth operation of the system without encountering bottlenecks. This monitoring also served to verify that the OCI platform remained the optimal choice, enabling resource optimization and scalability to meet evolving demands effectively.
• Interoperability: Enea’s Subscriber Data Management solutions were integrated with signalling, policy, and packet core functions, testing all the service-based architecture (SBA) interfaces of 5G core. This integration demonstrates an open SBA, ensuring interoperability and efficiency across the 5G ecosystem.
• Cost reduction: Cost savings were realized by using OCI flexible Computer shapes, which provide tailored sizing for optimal resource allocation.

Deploy in the cloud today

This certification ensures that both the Stratum Data Layer (UDR, UDSF) and Subscription Manager (UDM, AUSF) solutions can securely and robustly store data on OCI. Furthermore, these functions can flexibly access data through standard 3GPP service-based interfaces and establish user identity and authentication swiftly and securely on OCI. Enea software’s compatibility with OCI’s infrastructure, coupled with its proven reliability and performance in telecommunications (telco)-ready, cloud native environments, affirms its readiness for production deployment.

In both 5G standalone (5G SA) and 5G non standalone (5G NSA) architectures, the deployment of core functionalities like SDM varies based on factors, such as isolation, complexity, and organizational structure. For example, SDM can be securely deployed in individual Kubernetes cluster (OKE) within virtual cloud network (VCN) subnets, ensuring maximum isolation and separation of traffic and functionality, with strict access and routing control. Conversely, a single OKE cluster for the complete 5G Core can be utilized to reduce complexity.

Figure 1 depicts a deployment scenario where a group of network functions are deployed within individual Kubernetes (OKE) clusters across compartments. In this example, one OKE cluster is allocated for Enea’s functions (AUSF, UDM, and UDR), a second OKE cluster for packet core functions (AMF, SMF, and UPF), and a third cluster for Oracle’s policy, charging, routing, and selection functions.

The nodes of an OKE cluster are logically grouped into its own compartment to isolate resources. A compartment serves as a logical grouping of OCI resources and establishes contextual scope for granting permissions to groups of users by using policies. In this scenario, Enea’s functions are housed in compartment 2. Networking components, including VCNs, subnets, associated security lists, routing rules, and DNS zones are managed within the networking compartment, while a dedicated compartment houses observability and monitoring components, enabling specialized teams to work within their respective compartments. Additionally, Oracle security zones are associated with each compartment to enforce security policies, such as preventing compute resources from being accessed from the public internet or encrypting resources using customer-managed keys.

Enea’s UDR had a specific requirement on the buffer size. We achieved this goal by creating a dedicated namespace and node pool for the UDR. The dedicated node pool also makes the design future-proof, in case the UDR software evolves independently of the supported Kubernetes version.

Want to know more?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s carrier-grade platform and Enea’s best-in-class data management application functions offer CSPs reliable and resilient solutions to build and deploy modern, cloud native networks. To learn more, see Telco Cloud Infrastructure and Enea’s Stratum and Data Management Applications.