When deploying the Cisco ACI solution, LG Uplus first set up a Telco (Central) Data Center supporting both a bare metal environment and virtualization in two bases, Seoul and Daejeon, for nationwide operation of 5G commercial services.
Cisco ACI fabric was then independently deployed in each data center location and through integration with Samsung OpenStack, LG Uplus is currently operating vEPC (vMME, vSPGW and UDC). Redhat OSP, Cisco VIM, Canonical and VMWare can also be flexibly deployed in accordance with VNF requirements.
Physically, Cisco Nexus 9K switch based spine-leaf architecture was used to deploy a virtualized Packet Core solution in a single network fabric and integrated with ACI, an IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) device provided redirection of mobile user traffic. In this spine-leaf ACI fabric, three APICs acting as an SDN controller were clustered together to provide redundancy.
This ensures that 5G service network policies can be sent from APIC to all switches and if there is an error with the APIC controller, it will not interrupt 5G services.
This project was also the first time in Korea where an integration of a spine switch with 5G core network via ASR 9K was observed. This integration offered two key advantages as follows:
These solutions can be provided using features of XR-OS including EVPN and SR depending on the customer’s needs.
