Cavium, a provider of semiconductor products for enterprise, data centre, wired and wireless networking, and China Unicom announced a targeted program for the testing of 5G use cases on a M-CORD SDN/NFV platform leveraging Cavium's silicon-based white box hardware in M-CORD racks populated with ThunderX ARM-based data centre COTS servers and XPliant programmable SDN Ethernet-based white box switches.
Under the program, China Unicom and Cavium plan to shortly commence trials in a number of locations across mainland China to explore the potential of the new service.
Cavium and China Unicom are specifically demonstrating multi-access edge computing (MEC) use cases developed through a previously announced collaboration based on the ON.Lab M-CORD (Mobile Central Office Re-architected as a data centre) SDN/NFV platform at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai.
The demonstration involves a M-CORD SDN/NFV software platform and hardware rack integrated with virtualised and disaggregated mobile infrastructure elements from the edge of the RAN to distributed mobile core and the ONOS and XOS SDN and orchestration software.
The companies stated that this architecture is designed to enable turnkey operation in any central office or edge data centre for a full NFV C-RAN deployment. The solution is based on a Cavium-powered rack that combines the ThunderX ARM based data centre servers with the programmable XPliant Ethernet leaf and spine SDN switches to provide a full platform for M-CORD.
Regarding the latest project, Raj Singh, VP and GM of the network and communication group at Cavium, said, "Cavium is collaborating with China Unicom to explore 5G target use cases leveraging the M-CORD SDN/NFV platform and working towards field deployment… a homogenous hardware architecture optimised for NFV and 5G is a pre-requisite for field deployments".
- Earlier this year, Radisys and China Unicom announced they had partnered to build and integrate M-CORD development PODs featuring open source software. For the project Radisys, acting as systems integrator, used the CORD open reference implementation to enable cloud agility and improved economics in China Unicom's network. The companies also planned to develop deployment scenarios for the solution in the China Unicom network.
- The resulting platform was intended to support future 5G services by enabling mobile edge services, virtualised RAN and virtualised EPC. The companies also planned to develop an open reference implementations of a virtualised RAN and next-generation mobile core architecture.
