ZTE, HP and China Unicom Complete Testing of NFV-based VoLTE Offering

China's ZTE Corporation, a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, has completed a joint project with Hewlett-Packard and China Unicom to demonstrate the feasibility of NFV-based (network function virtualization) VoLTE (voice over LTE) services.

The Proof of Concept project involved a comprehensive range of vEPC and vIMS equipment and solutions provided by ZTE. The project comprised testing for end-to-end VoLTE services in a virtualized environment deployment solutions from different vendors, including interoperability of MANO functions and interfaces, VNF lifecycle management, VNF disaster recovery and maintenance management, VoLTE end-to-end functionality and performance, data plane acceleration and packet domain gateway functions of C/F separation.

To comply with European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) reference architecture, the project was completed using HP’s C7000 Blade server, and a virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM) provided by ZTE and HP. The project was also implemented using ZTE’s vEPC, vIMS, VNF Manager and EMS solutions, in addition to an NFV Orchestrator provided by HP and ZTE.

ZTE is committed to development of NFV and cloud-based network technologies, cooperating with operators and technology providers around the world in PoC projects. To date, ZTE’s virtualized core network solutions are deployed 5 commercial and 28 trial projects globally.