Huawei showcases latest NFV developments at the Big Telecom Event in Chicago
At Light Reading's Big Telecom Event (BTE) held in Chicago today, Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, showcased a number of new solutions and successful commercial deployments of network functions virtualization (NFV) with ICT industry partners, demonstrating the company's industry-leading capabilities to transform technological innovation into business innovation through harnessing the business value of NFV.
"NFV is an important cornerstone and plays a vital role on Huawei's SoftCOM strategy, the company's future-oriented open telecom network architecture. Successful deployment of NFV can drastically shorten the technological innovation cycle for telecom operators, expedite new service launches, reduce operation and maintenance costs, and realize traffic monetization. We believe this will pave the way towards a new era of ICT integration," said Mr. Libin Dai, Director of Integrated Solutions for Huawei's Carrier Business Group. "Through collaboration with major carriers, telecom vendors, IT vendors, and over-the-top (OTT) players, Huawei strives to drive NFV development and establish SoftCOM as a fully open network architecture which allows for complete vertical decoupling and horizontal open integration, while also supporting all third-party hardware, operating systems, and applications."
Through significantly improving the flexibility, agility, scalability and sharing capability of networks, this open architecture offers telecom operators four key business benefits:
It simplifies network operation and maintenance, reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for carriers;
It helps carriers improve their business innovation capability, expediting new service launches that enhance their market competitiveness;
It facilitates business innovation for OTT players, which in turn promotes the traffic monetization process for operators;
It helps operators generate more revenue by capturing business from enterprise customers, offering them fast deployment of applications and services.
At the event, Sean Chen, Director of Huawei's NFV Laboratory in the US, discussed ways in which the Huawei's NFV solution could increase sources of revenue for telecom operators. For example, Huawei's "mobile infrastructure network" concept allows end-users to enjoy consistent Internet and mobile services anywhere in the world. The enhanced user experience increases customer loyalty, translating to more revenue for telecom operators. Another Huawei concept, called the "personal mobile network" allows users to customize and build their own service chains to obtain intuitive, relevant, and personalized services, creating a strong traffic monetization opportunity for operators.
At BTE, Huawei also showcased the CloudEdge solution, an innovative solution for NFV implementation featuring a virtual multiservice engine (vMSE) as one of the core components of the solution. The vMSE offers an open platform for sharing that enables the aggregation of data traffic with various access modes and integrates many third-party applications. In doing so, the solution provides a unified management channel and opens network resources and data analysis capabilities to the applications. The solution can also intelligently define various paths for services. The virtualized management and orchestration component (MANO) for the CloudEdge solution is able to simultaneously manage a number of virtual network elements, including the vEPC, the vIMS and the vFamily, while also managing virtual devices from other vendors. As a result, end-users can enjoy quality end-to-end experiences while carriers can deploy new business quickly while enjoying simplified operations and management. To date, Huawei has conducted Proof-of-Concept (PoC) tests of the CloudEdge solution with a number of major global telecom operators, including China Mobile and integrated many applications, such as video optimization, web optimization, cache, and security, in collaboration with vendors such as SkyFire and Trend Micro Inc.
As a pioneer and visionary in the NFV field, Huawei is committed to developing NFV solutions that empower carriers in full network evolution and business transformation. To date, the ETSI Network Functions Virtualization Industry Specification Group has launched several NFV multi-vendor PoC applications submitted by Huawei, including the vIMS solution for Deutsche Telekom and the NFV capacity planning, service provisioning and billing solution for British Telecom.
