Cavium, Inc. and China Unicom announced they are launching a program to test 5G technology that leverages Cavium’s silicon-based white box hardware in M-CORD racks.
Cavium, Inc. is a semiconductor company based in San Jose, Calif., and China Unicom is a Chinese state-owned telecommunications operator. M-CORD is an open source project for service-driven 5G architecture. China Unicom and Cavium will commence trials in many areas dotted across the Chinese mainland.
Cavium reports China Unicom will use M-CORD racks with ThunderX ARM-based data center COTS servers and XPliant programmable SDN Ethernet switch-based white box switches. In addition, the M-CORD SDN/NFV platform will disaggregate mobile infrastructure elements from the edge of the Radio Access Network (RAN) to the mobile core. This provides turn-key operation in central offices or edge data centers for a full C-RAN deployment.
The businesses demonstrated a multi-access edge computing (MEC) use case at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai trade show last week. MEC is a network architecture that provides IT and cloud-computing capabilities at the cellular network. Both 5G and edge computing hold high hopes for lower latency.
“We are very excited to collaborate with China Unicom to explore 5G target use cases leveraging the M-CORD SDN/NFV platform and to work towards field deployment. A homogenous hardware architecture fully optimized for NFV and 5G functions is a key pre-requisite for field deployments,” said Raj Singh, vice president and general manager of the Network & Communication Group at Cavium, in a prepared statement.
“This differentiated and highly scalable implementation of M-CORD platform using Cavium silicon based white box hardware will allow operators such as China Unicom to rapidly implement next generation network topologies,” he added.
Cavium and China Unicom have collaborated before. Last December, for example, the companies worked together to develop virtual baseband units (vBBUs) for mobile networks at the forefronts of 5G. Furthermore, the two firms stated they are spearheading a fronthaul connection between the cellular base station and the mobile operators’ core network.
“Our collaboration with Cavium continues to deliver real progress and we are looking forward to trying M-CORD and virtualized RAN implementation in our network,” said Dr. Tang Xiongyan, chief scientist of Network Technology Research Institute, China Unicom, in a press statement. “We believe that our partnership will provide significant benefits to both parties.”
