Alcatel-Lucent Boost Operators With Visualized Radio Access Network Technology
By Emeka Aginam
10 MARCH 2015
Alcatel-Lucent at the just concluded Mobile World Congres held in Barcelona, Spain has demonstrated how wireless operators can use its visualized radio access network technology to dynamically meet changing market, customer and environmental demands, while also taking advantage of dramatically enhanced network performance and lowering costs.
The technology will allow operators to take advantage of economies of scale to help them meet the growing needs of their customers in the most flexible and effective way."
With its partners including Intel, China Mobile, and Telefónica Alcatel-Lucent showcased its NFV-based virtualized RAN and how it will allow operators to optimize and enhance network performance and the consumer experience
The demonstration at this year's MWC has further underlined Alcatel-Lucent's strategy of collaborating with industry leaders such as Intel, China Mobile and Telefónica to accelerate industry adoption of next-generation technologies as it strives to meet demands for capacity, performance and efficiency being placed upon it by the growth of new wireless devices.
This is even as the introduction of Alcatel-Lucent's vRAN platform comes just 12 months after it announced an agreement with Intel - at Mobile World Congress last year - to collaborate on NFV development.
The vRAN comprises a visualized baseband unit (vBBU) that uses general purpose servers with Intel® Xeon® processors to deliver cost-savings and increased network performance.
It would be recalled that Alcatel-Lucent has a long-standing co-development agreement in place with China Mobile to deliver mobile ultra-broadband innovations.
At Mobile World Congress 2014, the companies demonstrated the progress of the Cloud-RAN program. At this year's event China Mobile will showcase the advances they have helped deliver in both mobile and NFV networks.
Alcatel-Lucent also announced a co-innovation agreement with Telefónica at last year's Mobile World Congress, focused on driving industry adoption of NFV. Telefónica will demonstrate the Alcatel-Lucent vRAN solution on its booth as part of an ambitious example of an end-to-end fully virtualized network running at MWC 2015.
Accordingly, the demonstration of vRAN underlines Alcatel-Lucent's proven experience in wireless networks and in virtualization. In 12 months it has announced the virtualization of a wide range of network functions, including evolved packet core, IMS, Content Delivery Network and service routing technologies.
The company's NFV leadership is underpinned by the participation its 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) in 2014 - which further build on Alcatel-Lucent's strategy of delivering a complete range of networking solutions for a software-driven world.
Speaking on the solution, Dr. Chih-Lin I, Chief Scientist of China Mobile Research Institute said: "vRAN is a successful commercial instance of C-RAN. Since CMRI introduced the C-RAN concept to the industry 5 years ago, we have been working closely with Alcatel-Lucent to develop innovative solutions towards Greener and Softer future radio access networks. Our joint work in NFV, and specially in this case, on the vRAN, will help operators to smoothly evolve and meet growing customer demands with a more efficient and effective network structure."
For Enrique Blanco, Global CTO of Telefonica, "Alcatel Lucent is a great partner for providing innovative solutions as part of Telefonica Virtualization Strategy, and the collaboration in our Journey to 5G that included vRAN solutions will allows us to deploy more efficient networks and as a result the best opportunities for our customers."
Also speaking, Ken Rehbehn, Principal Analyst, 451 Research, said: "Virtualizing the RAN promises significant benefits for mobile operators. When deployed with appropriate transport technology, the approach reduces deployment complexity, boosts radio performance and drives network efficiencies. Joint demonstrations by key stakeholders -- operators and vendors -- signal the importance attached to this radio access deployment approach and serve as key proof points of progress."
According to Glenn Booth Senior Vice President and General Manger of Alcatel-Lucent's LTE Business Unit: "A virtualized RAN will allow operators to take a big step toward 5G and benefit from the advanced features and efficiencies enabled by LTE-A. By teaming on this technology, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel and China Mobile have been able to very quickly develop a comprehensive solution that will allow operators to evolve their networks more efficiently and effectively.
"We see tremendous value in bringing the benefits of Network Function Virtualization to the radio access network (RAN) to help operators reduce their operating expenditures and implement new service capabilities", said Sandra Rivera, vice president, Datacenter Group, general manager, Network Platforms Group, Intel Corporation.
"Through our global collaboration agreement with Alcatel-Lucent, we have made great progress in the development of a vRAN solution that demonstrates our combined capabilities.
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