ZTE softens up with SDN, NFV and cloud demos at MWC 2015

Software-defined networking and network functions virtualization took centre stage for ZTE at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, with the vendor making multiple announcements at the show angled towards the emerging networking technologies.

The firm announced how it will be utilising SDN, NFV and cloud computing to steer its networking portfolio of products towards the enablement of 5G. Firstly, it announced how SDN will be utilised to better manage IP radio access network operations and management in the face of increasing mobile broadband workloads.

Working with the Open Networking Foundation (OIF) and Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF), ZTE has been able to achieve OpenFlow conformity certification and ensure that the IP RAN SDN solution will be compatible with most commonly deployed architecture, while unifying management on both access layer and aggregation layer equipment.

Meanwhile, ZTE’s also managed to integrate SDN and NFV into its Softnet mobile architecture, working closely with China Mobile to enhance the scalability and efficiency of the operator’s mobile networks. The SDN element of the solution is able to separate signalling processing on the control plane from the packet forwarding and value adding processing modules on the user plane. Essentially, this enables the fundamental premise of SDN, to centralise the control of traffic routing across the network. With regards to NFV, it’s integrated its SDN solution with virtualized elements of the mobile network, including the IMS, user data centre and circuit & packet switching.

Speaking of the mobile network, and China Mobile, the two firms linked up again to collaborate on 5G-capable massive MIMO base stations. During the demo in Barcelona, the trial apparently reached a peak value of three times higher than traditional 8-antenna base stations. ZTE claims the test yielded record breaking results in terms of spectral efficiency and single-carrier capacity. The “Pre5G” base stations integrate baseband units, radio frequency units and 128 antennas into the space of a traditional 8-antenna base station.

Finally, ZTE, China Mobile and Qualcomm also collaborated on demonstrating TD-LTE three-carrier aggregation at MWC. ZTE claimed that three 20 MHz carriers in the 2.6GHz TDD frequency achieved download speeds of 330Mbps in the trial, by utilising a combination of ZTE’s TD-LTE eNodeB and EPC devices, with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor with X10 LTE modems.