US 11,838,150 B2
Leveraging a virtual router to bridge between an underlay and an overlay
Andrew Trujillo, Littleton, CO (US); Ash Khamas, Goffstown, NH (US); and Sundeep Goswami, Leesburg, VA (US)
Assigned to DISH Wireless L.L.C., Englewood, CO (US)
Filed by DISH Wireless L.L.C., Englewood, CO (US)
Filed on Jan. 24, 2023, as Appl. No. 18/101,069.
Claims priority of provisional application 63/331,107, filed on Apr. 14, 2022.
Prior Publication US 2023/0336381 A1, Oct. 19, 2023
Int. Cl. H04L 12/66 (2006.01); H04L 12/46 (2006.01)
CPC H04L 12/66 (2013.01) [H04L 12/462 (2013.01); H04L 12/4633 (2013.01)] 18 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method for bridging data traffic between an underlay network and an overlay network, the method comprising:
providing, by a mobile network operator, a distributed unit (DU) of a fifth-generation (5G) cellular telecommunication network radio access network (RAN) that is served by a particular 5G cellular site base station, wherein the DU:
is associated with a primary 5G Node B (gNB) identified by a primary identifier (ID); and
is in operable communication with a corresponding primary central unit control plane (CU-CP) of a 5G primary centralized unit (CU) that is hosted on a cloud-native virtualized compute instance in a primary cloud availability zone and is also associated with the primary gNB identified by the primary ID;
providing access to an overlay network that includes virtual routers, wherein the overlay network is built above the underlay network, the underlay network including physical infrastructure that delivers packets;
providing a UPFv (User Plane Function for Voice) that acts as an anchor for telephony voice functions;
establishing routing protocols to transmit from the UPFv to one or more of the virtual routers;
configuring one or more of the virtual routers to bridge an outgoing communication from the UPFv to a public cloud provider;
instructing the virtual router to send the outgoing communication through the public cloud provider to the underlay network; and
instructing the virtual router to receive an incoming communication from the underlay network through the public cloud provider to the UPFv.