Setting itself up to garner leadership in network function virtualization for telecom, Alcatel-Lucent today announced its portfolio of virtualized mobile network functions including the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and the radio access network (RAN).
Alcatel-Lucent said it is already working with 20 service providers around the world on leveraging NFV in their networks with the new solutions. According to Heidi Adams, senior product manager for Alcatel-Lucent, the company already has eight cloud IMS customer trials and three contracts for its vIMS in VoLTE networks; five vEPC trials; and four contracts for virtualized 3G radio network controllers (RNC).
Alcatel-Lucent is also demonstrating its virtual RAN proof of concept for LTE with China Mobile at next week’s Mobile World Congress. Visitors to China Mobile’s booth will be able to make calls on VoLTE-capable handsets enabled by a multi-vendor cloud network that includes ALU’s virtualized LTE RAN baseband unit (BBU) and vEPC and managed by the company’s NFV orchestration platform, CloudBand 2.0.
The history of this demo stretches back to 2011, when Alcatel-Lucent and China Mobile signed an agreement to develop a Cloud-RAN.
Adams said that in contrast to NFV for enterprise and IT, virtualization in telecom networks must maintain stringent reliability and performance standards; be able to operate transparently across both virtualized and traditional legacy networks; operate in an open, multi-vendor environment; and be able to deliver flexible scaling that allows operators to ramp up and down according to demand. In general, as Adams put it, NFV for telecom must also answer the question of “How can you make these networks functions even better by moving them to the cloud?”
“There are new ways to solve elasticity, and how you can deliver more scale, and more redundancy — we have new ways to solve this as we move into the cloud,” she added. Alcatel-Lucent’s theme for Mobile World Congress is “mobile meets cloud,” and Adams said that she expects NFV to be a hot topic at the conference next week.
Adams added that the underlying platform for  the orchestration and control of the virtualized elements (in this case, Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand 2.0 platform) must also be built with the requirements of telecom networks in mind so that it can place resources appropriately, with the NFV elements automated and stitched together under the broader rubric of software-defined networking (SDN), where ALU has its Nuage Networks SDN venture to leverage.
“NFV is a journey. All of these things need to come together,” Adams said.
“The arguments for NFV are compelling for mobile operators. … NFV is timely as operators migrate to LTE and look for new ways to take full advantage of this technology,” said Caroline Chappell, senior analyst with Heavy Reading, in a statement. “However, it is critical that virtualized network functions for LTE maintain the features and stringent performance requirements of the same functions in non-virtualized networks. NFV also provides mobile operators with an opportunity to rethink network operations and reduce operational cost.”
Marcus Weldon, corporate CTO for Alcatel-Lucent and president of Bell Labs, said in a statement that the company’s investments in NFV, its CloudBand 2.0 platform and its venture into SDN with Nuage Networks “are clear proof points that we have all the elements to help operators create an open, agile, efficient cloud environment at a speed which meets their individual needs.”
