Vodafone tests Huawei's cloud-based Broadband Network Gateway

Vodafone recently completed the second phase test of Huawei's cloud-based Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) solution in a fixed broadband scenario.

The phase I testing was performed in December 2017 and focused on 52 functional tests of the solution, while the phase II testing, completed in May 2018, focused on the Vodafone Portugal service architecture including internet access and VPN services. Both phase I and II have been completed successfully.

Phase II testing covered access, authentication and accounting for home broadband users in various scenarios. It also included performance, reliability and security testing of cloud-based BNG systems. Vodafone and Huawei verified functionality of the cloud-based BNG solution using virtual network functions (VNFs) as the control plane and also using physical network functions (PNFs) as the user plane.

Huawei says its BNG solution features a Control & User Plane Separation (CUPS) architecture, which decouples the control and user planes of traditional BNG architectures. The control plane integrates the user management functions of multiple BNGs and shifts their resources to the cloud. In addition to automated service provisioning and network O&M, the solution deployment in the cloud also enables global resource sharing, elastic capacity scaling, flexible architecture adjustment and network capability exposure.

Jeffrey Gao, President of Huawei's Router & Carrier Ethernet Product line, stated: "Cloud-based BNG is an innovative implementation of Huawei's Intent-Driven Network in the context of network service cloudification. The Intent-Driven Network decouples traditional networks into an elastic, reliable bearer layer and an agile service layer. This creates a simple architecture enabling the rapid and flexible adjustment of resources. This solution helps operators improve the efficiency of their network operations, reduce O&M costs and smoothly evolve network services to the cloud."