Nokia has announced the first successful completion of interoperability tests of the User Plane Function (UPF) of the 5G Standalone (SA) Packet Core in the Sylva open-source cloud software environment. The tests were carried out at Orange's new Project Sylva Validation Center in France.
The overall goal of Project Sylva is to provide a reference open-source cloud software framework tailored for telco and edge requirements that address the industry's technical challenges. Sylva was launched by the Linux Foundation Europe at the end of 2022, and its supporters include Nokia and Orange.
The test validation is an important step toward providing a versatile cloud-native solution that allows for large-scale deployments of 5G SA Core Network functions. Project Sylva aims to provide an efficient way to deploy Industry 4.0, IoT and B2B2X use cases at the edge for 5G private wireless enterprise customers.
Senior Vice President & General Manager of Core Networks, Cloud and Network Services, at Nokia, Fran Heeran, said, “Nokia’s fully cloud-native Core Network portfolio is designed to support the evolving telco cloud environment through open, flexible deployment options with greatly reduced integration and advanced automation capabilities. The successful completion of the interoperability tests of our 5G SA Core’s User Plane Function at Sylva Validation Center, hosted by Orange, underscores our commitment and the advances we are making.”
Group Chief Technology Officer at Orange, Laurent Leboucher, stated, "This successful test made with Nokia constitutes an important step towards the adoption of Sylva as an industrial standard reference implementation for demanding telco workloads. More specifically, it addresses use cases (industrial campus, IoT, computer vision) where the traffic can be managed locally on a simple and open infrastructure and can still be controlled by the public network. Many more use cases will come soon.”
“The validation program is intended to demonstrate that cloud-native workloads can deploy in a reference Telco cloud stack, promoting standardization to reduce fragmentation. The validation of Nokia UPF in the platform provided by Sylva is a milestone for the adoption of a cloud-native designed ecosystem," according to the Head of Cloud & Infrastructure at Telefónica and leader of the validation program at Sylva, Luis Velarde.
