Partnership taps OPNFV platform for test lab, small cell gateway, C-RAN
Wind River said it has partnered with China Mobile on a number of network function virtualization projects, including an NFV test lab, and working on developing virtualized small cell gateway and cloud radio access network solutions.
The test lab is based on the Open Platform for NFV Project launched last year, which is looking to develop a “carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services” tied to NFV. China Mobile was a founding “platinum member” of the OPNFV initiative.
Wind River said the test lab is able to provide “commercial-grade NFV platforms,” including its own Titanium Server software, to support open-source development and testing.
China Mobile and Wind River also announced progress in terms of developing the virtualized small cell gateway technology by demonstrating “the feasibility of creating high-performance, high-available data plane virtual network functions at a considerable lower cost and with greatly improved flexibility.”
“The industry is adopting NFV models in order to quickly deploy new services and achieve greater operational cost savings,” explained Zhiqiang Yang, deputy GM of China Mobile Research Institute. “However, performance and system reliability cannot be sacrificed. It is essential to maintain carrier grade requirements.”
The C-RAN solution also targets NFV deployments, with a live demonstration at this week’s Mobile World Congress event that showed “near-native hardware performance and live migration of [Level 1] to [Level 3],” and adherence to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute NFV Industry Standards Group. That demonstration featured Wind River’s Titanium Server technologies running on an Intel Xeon processor-based server with a dedicated hardware accelerator.
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