KDDI looks for power reduction through TIP Backbone Routers

Reducing power consumption in their vast technology estates is a huge priority for telcos around the world. To make its necessary savings, leading Japanese provider KDDI announced that it is deploying distributed disaggregated backbone routers (DDBRs) from the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) as the internet gateway peering routers to reduce power consumption, equipment capital cost and rack space.

The TIP initiative is focused on accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry worldwide, and aims to accelerate the pace of innovation in the telecom industry by designing, building and deploying technologies that are more flexible and efficient.

The organisation believes today’s operators face a key challenge with demands on their networks continuing to rise despite a persistent connectivity gap, adding that operators need to extend their networks to connect more people, as well as upgrade their networks to support increasing traffic.

Putting the new deal into context, TIP said that as 5G services expand use cases in mobile communications, 5G traffic will increase rapidly due to the wide range and increase of connected terminals.

To sustain this growth, it believes that further system optimisation such as lower power consumption, smaller size and lower cost systems are required for the 5G network infrastructure.

Furthermore, since dedicated routers are needed to be deployed in each area of the carrier backbone networks, such as core, edge, and internet GW, the equipment capital cost and complexity increase.

TIP added that historically carriers have needed unique, dedicated routers for different areas of the network and that traditional routers comprise single-vendor technology. To handle these issues, KDDI became a TIP participant to promote the development of open and disaggregated technologies for telecommunication systems.

DDBR is designed to enable a multi-supplier architecture and comprises DriveNets Network Cloud software, 40×100GE line card systems from Delta Electronics and merchant silicon (Jericho2) from Broadcom.

KDDI’s DDBR architecture is said to have two key advantages: optimal merchant silicon selection and configuration and sharing of hardware resources. TIP calculated that using DDBR to carrying live internet traffic will start helping KDDI to reduce power consumption by about 46% and the rack space by about 40% compared with the traditional routers in KDDI production networks.

DDBR also enables KDDI to utilise the same white box hardware infrastructure for multiple areas of the network, such as core, edge and internet gateway. As a result, it will enable KDDI to share hardware spare parts in the backbone networks, leading to the reduction of the equipment capital cost. A single Jericho2 inside the hardware box is said to have enough capability to fulfil software/hardware features and scalability in KDDI production networks.

The operator completed the DDBR technical requirements document in May 2021 and TIP announced the DDBR-compliant vendors in March 2022. In March 2022, KDDI completed a final phase of commercial testing for DDBR. Going forward, KDDI will continue to lead the carrier-grade white box router deployment in conjunction with global TIP activities.