Wind River and China Mobile collaborate to accelerate NFV

BANGALORE, INDIA: Wind River and China Mobile have joined forces on multiple Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) projects.

The collaboration includes a new NFV test lab as well as the development of virtualized small cell gateway and cloud radio access network (C-RAN) solutions. The combination of these efforts is designed to help the industry begin to roll out NFV deployments and reduce time-to-market and operating expenses (OPEX).

China Mobile has created a new test lab, based on the OPNFV open source project, focused on accelerating NFV through an integrated, open platform. The OPNFV lab provides a diverse hardware and software infrastructure for open standards-based testing and integration, including live network access.

The lab is able to provide commercial grade NFV platforms, including Wind River Titanium Server software, to support open source development and testing. Offering a rich environment for the testing and evaluation of commercial NFV platforms, the lab provides a variety of participation opportunities for a diverse range of partners across the ecosystem.

The virtualized small cell gateway solution features the ASTRI Small Cell Gateway as a VNF on Wind River Titanium Server, running on the Intel Xeon processor. The ASTRI gateways are designed for offload signaling and mobility management to the mobile core network and were pre-validated and optimized for performance with Titanium Server, a carrier grade NFV infrastructure software solution that is designed to meet the stringent "always on" requirements of the telecom industry.

“The industry is adopting NFV models in order to quickly deploy new services and achieve greater operational cost savings. However, performance and system reliability cannot be sacrificed. It is essential to maintain carrier grade requirements,” said Zhiqiang Yang, deputy general manager of China Mobile Research Institute. "By working with Wind River, we have made a meaningful step in this promising direction.”

“With Wind River’s help, we successfully developed an industry-first virtualized C-RAN base station baseband processing unit (BBU) pool prototype that supports dynamic full carrier live migration while satisfying the stringent real-time requirement of a complete LTE protocol stack,” said Dr. Chih-Lin I, chief scientist at China Mobile Research Institute.

By using Titanium Server as their NFV infrastructure platform, customers may enjoy both the rapid service deployment of enterprise networks coupled with the carrier grade uptime and reliability typically mandated by telecom networks. Based on technologies using open standards including carrier grade Wind River Linux, real-time Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), carrier grade plugins for OpenStack, Data Plane Development Kit, and accelerated vSwitch technologies, and optimized for Intel architecture, Titanium Server brings together high performance and carrier grade reliability.

Both the virtualized small cell gateway and the C-RAN demonstration will be showcased at Mobile World Congress 2015.