Reliance Jio
Reliance Jio is India’s largest LTE service provider and is currently investing in 5G R&D to roll out its 5G services in the country once they get spectrum licenses.
Key Needs and Challenges
Jio’s R&D team has an initiative to build their own in-house gNodeB system using Radisys’s 5G base station stack. Unlike LTE, where they depended on regular base station vendors, they have decided to make their own 5G gNodeBs. The goal is to be able to develop customized features and a custom network architecture that can be ready before the spectrum license allotment.
Software development and QA are conducted at their Network Replica Lab in Mumbai.
Validation Requirements
Similar to Radisys, Jio needs included keeping up with these:
- Ever evolving 5G specs based on 3GPP
- Integration of software stack with various radio access systems, RRUs
- Handling wide frequency spectrum and bandwidths
- Implementing customer-specific features & standards
- Functional and conformance validation
- Achieving desired performance KPIs
- Continuous, automated validation to achieve CI/CD
Radisys being a supplier of the protocol stacks was validating on their own. Jio needed to do similar validation but in addition, had to validate specific applications and services specific to their network.
Historically, their R&D teams were using traditional hardware-centric UE simulator tools. However, these expensive tools were not easy to deploy or automated and also required high maintenance costs. This severely restricted their development and testing capabilities and hence their time to market. To achieve their goals, Jio was in search of a UE simulator system which could enable them to execute their validation scenarios efficiency in an automated fashion but also a commercial model that would allow them to create parallel testbeds so their engineering team can innovate faster and introduce new features in a timely manner.
How Simnovus Delivered Value
We had a strong reference from Radisys. We proposed our UE Simulator that is built on software-defined radio and transforms intel x86 based on commercially off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware into UE Simulator. We offered a software approach to solve their engineering challenges by enabling them to create multiple parallel test beds.
The evaluation cycle lasted for about a month. After overcoming a few initial challenges, the Simnovus solution was selected.
The Simnovus Winning Value Proposition
- Software solution – quick to deliver, install, upgrade
- One-click automation
- Functional and performance validation from the same solution
- Swift and efficient tech support
- Multiple concurrent testbeds
- Highest value for money
Our UE Simulator enabled Reliance Jio to accelerate their 5G R&D initiatives. They are levering our UE Simulator’s capabilities to validate various application traffic, real life traffic simulations and interoperability with other nodes.
