Huawei, China Mobile Demonstrate Cloudified VoLTE Solution

Huawei has announced the successful demonstration of its virtualized VoLTE solution designed specifically to support China Mobile’s Cloudified VoLTE service.

The demonstration is an extension of Huawei’s ongoing partnership with China Mobile and reinforces the innovation and vision of NFV as the next-generation core network architecture.

The acceleration of cloud technology development has resulted in carriers moving away from traditional service architecture unable to provide a satisfactory user experience, to an ICT integrated cloud architecture. NFV will change the closed circle of the traditional telecom network, shorten service innovation period, reduce operation and maintenance costs, and establish a more open industrial chain.

The Huawei Cloudified VoLTE solution runs on Huawei commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware servers and cloud operating system. The demonstration featured NFV-based core network elements, including a virtualized IP Multimedia Subsystem (vIMS), a virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC), a virtualized subscriber data management (vSDM), and a virtualized policy and charging rules function (vPCRF).

Customers were able to personalize their experience of the Cloudified VoLTE solution through HD audio and video services. Huawei team members also provided information to build customers’ understanding on how network functions virtualization (NFV) provides carriers with an open network that is flexible, reliable, cost-efficient, and easy to operate and maintain.

Research and development of 4.5G and 5G has been accelerating with the widespread deployment and large-scale commercialization of 4G. During the demonstration, China Mobile and Huawei also displayed the solution and prototype system of the next-generation mobile network architecture.

This solution adopts innovative concepts such as software defined network (SDN) and NFV to meet the future requirements of mobile services on network flexibility, scalability, and rapid deployment. The demonstration of this prototype system included showcasing the automatic instantiation and dynamic scalability of the forwarding entity, the switchover of local gateway forwarding plane, and real-time service chain policy control.

Since 2007, Huawei’s joint innovation with China Mobile in the area of mobile core network has explored the use of an IT platform to replace the traditional telecom platform. In 2012, Huawei and China Mobile officially initiated the research and verification of NFV and gradually developed a series of plans to verify NFV in labs and test it on the existing network, aiming for commercial utilization.

Huawei is building and improving the ecosystem and aims to ensure high network reliability by constructing a multi-scenario and multi-vendor integration and verification platform. Huawei has cooperated with more than 20 leading carriers in the world, including China Mobile, to innovate and verify NFV, and predicts that it will forge more than 50 additional partnerships in the NFV field this year.