NEWS

Wind River ties up with China Mobile over NFV for Mobile Networks

By VARINDIA - 2015-03-02

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). 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 signalling 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, China Mobile Research Institute. “Data traffic is pushing networks to their limits and operators are looking to deploy NFV technologies for flexible deployment of network applications and services. The complexities around NFV are multi-faceted, and in order to make real progress, it is essential to collaborate with industry leaders like China Mobile,” said Charlie Ashton, Senior Director of Business Development for Networking Solutions, Wind River. Additionally, China Mobile and Wind River have developed a C-RAN solution for NFV deployment. The joint solution delivers a live demonstration of a successful C-RAN that provides near-native hardware performance and live migration of L1 to L3, and that follows the requirements of the ETSI NFV Industry Standards Group.