MENLO PARK, Calif. Feb 14, 2019 – ONF, the recognized leader driving transformation of the networking industry through collaborative development of open source platforms, today announced the launch of Open Mobile Evolved Core (OMEC), an industry-first high performance scalable open source Mobile Core platform. ONF, in collaboration with Sprint, is launching OMEC under the CORD® project umbrella. The project is intended to become an open source production grade Evolved Packet Core (EPC).
OMEC is built using an NFV (Network Function Virtualization) architecture that is optimized for Intel platforms and tested for scale.
OMEC includes:
- Complete connectivity, billing and charging capabilities
- 3GPP Release 13 compatibility
- Support for large numbers of subscribers with a high performance DPDK based dataplane
- Optimization for lightweight cost effective deployments and IoT applications
- Integrated CI/CD test and verification capabilities
“Sprint is excited to be co-launching the OMEC project addressing the need for an open mobile core. Sprint’s Clean CUPS Core for Packet Optimization (C3PO) project along with other elements are being contributed as seed code for the launch of OMEC. We plan to conduct field trials using OMEC for edge applications this year, and we’re thrilled to be working with the ONF to build a broader community to leverage and build upon OMEC.”
- Ron Marquardt, Vice President of Technology, Sprint
“Intel has been a driving force behind NFV and optimizations for Intel platforms and was a key contributor to the OMEC code that is open sourced by ONF today. OMEC demonstrates the powerful capabilities of Intel technology, including Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) based billing and charging systems with enhanced security. OMEC provides the open-source community with a next-generation disaggregated, scalable and virtualized mobile core, optimized using Data-Plane Development Kit (DPDK) on Intel® Xeon® processors. This will help accelerate the transformation of networks to be ready for the exciting transition to 5G”.
- Richard Uhlig, Intel Senior Fellow and Director of Intel Labs
“Deutsche Telekom has been an avid supporter of the ONF approach for driving transformation of operator networks through open source. Our plan is to take OMEC into production in our T-Mobile Poland geography as a first step towards leveraging ONF open source platforms for our mobile and 5G infrastructure. We are very excited to see the launch of OMEC and enthusiastic about its potential to help us transform our next-generation mobile networks.”
Thomas Lips, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, T-Mobile Polska
OMEC, a robust mobile core implementation compliant with the 3GPP architecture, includes the following EPC and Charging components:
- SGW-C, PGW-C (Includes embedded PCEF), SGW-U, PGW-U, MME, HSS, HSS Database, Diameter Capability, PCRF, Forwarding Policy Control SDN Controller, CTF, CDF, SGX Billing Router
- Operational tools, including CLI, Logging and Statistics Interface APIs to VNFs
- DPDK based traffic generator for testing S1u and Sgi user planes
- CI/CD tools for deployment automation for bringing up core network VNFs, associated networking, package installation, provisioning, and configuration.
Relationship with COMAC
In a related release, today ONF is announcing the COMAC project (Converged Mobile Access and Core) and a paired Reference Design.
OMEC is an ‘upstream project’ to the COMAC project. COMAC will be able to leverage and build upon the OMEC Mobile Core implementation in order to more rapidly achieve its goals of building a converged access and core for delivering unified services to fixed and mobile subscribers.
MWC Demo
OMEC will be displayed February 24-28 in Barcelona at the World Mobile Congress show (MWC) at ONF’s booth in Hall 1, Booth #1E11. Click here to schedule a demonstration with the lead OMEC architects at the show in Barcelona.
Getting Involved
OMEC is an open community led project. An elected Technical Steering Team (TST) will steer the project, and TST meetings are open to the public. As of today, all code is now publicly available on github published using Apache 2.0 licensing.
A number of resources are available to help one get started navigating this new project:
About the Open Networking Foundation:
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is an operator led consortium spearheading disruptive network transformation. Now the recognized leader for open source solutions for operators, the ONF first launched in 2011 as the standard bearer for Software Defined Networking (SDN). Led by its operator partners AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Google, NTT Group and Turk Telekom, the ONF is driving vast transformation across the operator space. For further information visit https://opennetworking.org
Media Contact:
Greg Cross
PR for the Open Networking Foundation
email: greg@opennetworking.org
