Nokia announced it has achieved a new private wireless network capacity record, reaching 100Gbps throughput on a single MX Industrial Edge server. The trial, conducted in partnership with Intel, demonstrated that the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC) and MX Industrial Edge systems are not only ready for high bandwidth 5G private wireless deployments, but also have the capacity for processing of Industry 4.0 use cases running on the edge at scale.
The demand for high-bandwidth, low latency secure wireless networks is growing in asset-intensive industries, which seek to digitalize operations to increase efficiency, productivity and safety on the journey to Industry 4.0. Organizations are also under pressure to do so with a cost-effective, scalable solution that can support their needs today with private wireless 4.9G/LTE and 5G SA, as well as the future scope to enable the integration of more industrial use cases on the private wireless network and their mission-critical edge.
Nokia MX Industrial Edge is designed to help industrial enterprises accelerate their operational technology (OT) digitalization initiatives and is powered by Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (Nokia DAC). It is based on Nokia’s AirFrame Open Edge server, optimized for Intel’s latest innovations and CPU for high-capacity processing.
Janne Parantainen, CTO for Enterprise Solutions at Nokia, said: “In partnership with Intel, this milestone achievement is a testament to our continued investment in providing customers with the best solution capabilities to meet their evolving needs. The results from the test are truly promising, as they demonstrate that private wireless networking and digitalisation application workloads can be consolidated into a single server providing significant cost savings and operation simplification. Our customers can feel assured that the MX Industrial Edge and Nokia Digital Automation Cloud systems can not only handle the demands of Industry 4.0 traffic today, but in the future when technology requiring more bandwidth – like AR – become common-place.”
Caroline Chan, VP, Network Platforms Group and GM, Network Business Incubation Division at Intel, said: “Nokia and Intel have a long-standing partnership to provide innovative solutions from the core to the edge of the intelligent network, which Nokia is expanding to accelerate Industry 4.0 adoption. The combination of Intel’s innovations and CPUs alongside Nokia’s Industrial Edge Platform and 5G technology will offer enterprise customers the ability to connect, deploy and manage their environments. Across different verticals enterprises will benefit from the scalable performance and high-speed, low-latency reliable communications.”
About the test:
In the test setup, a single Nokia Airframe Open Edge R20 server with 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor, dual 100Gbps NICs and fast packet routing, supported the traffic generated by 60x 5G gNBs and 120 users culminating to an aggregated total throughput of 100Gbps – the equivalent of simultaneous transmission of several thousands of 4K camera streams.
During the test, in addition to the Nokia MX Industrial edge running the routing function and the Nokia DAC 5G SA private wireless core and management, the majority of the CPU processing and memory capacity remained available to tackle the processing of Industry 4.0 use cases running on the MX Industrial Edge server. This achievement proves that the MX Industrial Edge solution offers customers the flexibility and scalability to perform mission-critical tasks and implement advanced future technology, such as Mixed Reality in Industry 4.0.