PARIS, July 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Alcatel-Lucent
(Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) and China Mobile, the world's
largest mobile communications service provider, have conducted the
industry's first field trial of a virtualized radio access
network-based architecture based on network functions
virtualization (NFV) technology.
The trial – carried out at Beijing's Tisinghua University - demonstrated
the flexibility, scalability, cost and energy-efficiency of
Alcatel-Lucent's vRAN and NFV technologies for meeting the
dynamically changing demands for access from an ever increasing
number of applications and devices, people and machines. This is
also an important step in the path towards 5G networks.
It is expected that the Internet of Things and millions of
people connecting to the Internet for the first time will place
huge demands on mobile networks over the coming years, with data
traffic predicted to increase almost tenfold between 2014 and
2019[i]. To manage this increase, China Mobile is preparing for the
evolution to 5G, which promises greater network convergence, better
spectral efficiency, support for more users, higher data rates and
a more consistent user experience.
In the trial Alcatel-Lucent's vRAN technology was deployed
throughout the 442 hectares of Beijing's Tisinghua University campus, one of
the leading universities in China
with approximately 57,000 students and teachers. The trial provided
both indoor and outdoor coverage and demonstrated the flexibility
of the vRAN network, including its ability to dynamically scale
network resources in response to traffic demands by the users
across the campus.
Key Facts:
- Alcatel-Lucent is the first vendor to provide an operational
vRAN solution in a campus environment supporting large numbers of
users.
- Alcatel-Lucent's vRAN technology:
- offers the ability to flexibly scale and perform load balancing
and real-time migration across network resources to allow service
providers like China Mobile to lower costs.
- allows for increased spectral efficiency with less interference
- especially for heterogeneous networks built with multiple radios
and radio technologies.
- enables enhanced cell site coordination to increase network
performance and the capability to host latency sensitive
applications at the edge.
- By deploying an NFV-based RAN platform, service providers can
lay the foundation for supporting multiple access technologies,
such as LTE, LTE-Advanced and Wi-Fi, while providing an evolution
path to 5G and accelerating time-to-market for new,
revenue-generating services.
- Since the China Mobile Research Institute introduced the
concept of C-RAN to the industry five years ago, China Mobile and
Alcatel Lucent have worked closely to develop innovative technology
for future radio access networks. Joint work in NFV, and
particularly on the vRAN, will help operators to smoothly evolve
and meet growing customer demands with a more efficient and
effective network structure.
Alcatel-Lucent has proven experience in both wireless networks
and virtualization with a virtualized radio network controller
(vRNC) solution in commercial service for more than a year,
and has already announced virtualization of a wide range of
network functions, including the evolved packet core (vEPC),
and IP Multimedia Subsystem (vIMS), Content Delivery Network
(vCDN) and service routing (VSR).
Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated its vRAN solution at Mobile World
Congress 2015. Its NFV leadership is underpinned by the
participation of the CloudBand NFV platform in over 30
customer projects, an NFV ecosystem of over 60 members and
extensive Nuage Networks SDN capabilities - including the launch
of the Virtualized Networks Services (VNS) and the
Virtulization Services Assurance Platform. In May 2015, Alcatel-Lucent announced the launch of
a carrier SDN platform that unifies service automation with network
optimization – the Network Services Platform.
Following the successful field trial at Beijing's Tisinghua University, Alcatel-Lucent
will demonstrate the vRAN platform at Mobile World Congress
Shanghai between July 15 and 17,
2015. The demonstrations will include the NFV-based RAN and
the wireless dual site solution based on the convergence with
wireline. The demonstration further underlines Alcatel-Lucent's
leading position in wireless NFV and its continuous focus on the
evolution of wireless networks to accelerate industry adoption of
next-generation technologies.
Quotes:
Dr. Chih-Lin I, Chief Scientist of China Mobile Research
Institute said: "The vRAN technology will allow us to deliver new
efficiencies across our network as our customers' data demands
change and more devices connect to our network. We are interested
to see how the deployment of Alcatel-Lucent's vRAN will help us to
smoothly evolve our networks to meet these demands."
Glenn Booth Senior Vice President
and General Manger of Alcatel-Lucent's LTE Business Unit said:
"Alcatel-Lucent is committed to delivering the latest innovations
that enable our customers to get the most out of their LTE networks
and enable a smooth path to 5G. This trial is a prime example of
how we are working with customers to develop, test and deploy
networks with the highest performance and efficiencies and the
lowest costs."
More Information:
- Alcatel-Lucent: LTE to 5G
1 Statista:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/271405/global-mobile-data-traffic-forecast/
About Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE:
ALU)
Alcatel-Lucent is the leading IP
networking, ultra-broadband access and cloud technology specialist.
We are dedicated to making global communications more innovative,
sustainable and accessible for people, businesses and governments
worldwide. Our mission is to invent and deliver trusted networks to
help our customers unleash their value. Every success has its
network.
For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on:
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com, read the latest posts on the
Alcatel-Lucent blog http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/blog and follow
the Company on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/Alcatel_Lucent.
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SOURCE Alcatel-Lucent