Announcing the Aether 2.0 Release

22 views

Skip to first unread message

Scott Baker

unread,

Mar 11, 2022, 7:58:16 PM3/11/22

to Aether-Dev

Today we release Aether 2.0, the first Aether release to fully embrace open source. This release adds two exciting new capabilities. The first is support for 5G deployments, enabling greatly increased bandwidth compared to 4G-based deployments. Complementing 5G is our P4 based mobile-core User Plane Function (UPF), which offers a high performance hardware-accelerated datapath that does not need to be routed through compute-based software UPFs. Aether maintains backward compatibility with 4G, and both 4G and 5G slices may make use of both software and hardware based UPFs. P4 hardware and BESS software UPFs can be deployed side-by-side in a hybrid deployment.

As part of this release, several edge applications have been showcased on the Aether platform. We demonstrated the first Aether-interactive smart application, an OpenVINO based AI/ML person-detection application that dynamically increases network-bandwidth for video recording purposes when a person is detected, and then dynamically reduces the same when people are no longer detected. In partnership with Intel, we have also deployed an anomaly detection application on the Aether platform that runs as an edge application, monitors a manufacturing or packaging line of product samples, and then uses an AI/ML algorithm to detect anomalies in real time. These applications were demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona.

The transition to open source will further increase the pace of Aether development, putting it within the reach of the 5G and edge developer community that ONF has been cultivating and encouraging. Developer contributions are welcome, and increased access will allow increased adoption of this technology.