Nokia Siemens Networks said today that it has successfully tested Voice over LTE and other IMS services in a virtualized core network environment, demonstrating deployment readiness of the technology.
According to the company, the testing involved industry-standard virtualization and cloud management infrastructure and commercial, off-the-shelf IT server hardware; all of the cloud test cases were enabled by the existing NSN operations support systems (OSS) and a cloud app management system.
Software-defined networking and the virtualization of network features has been a hot topic at telecom conferences this year, as operators look to reduce their network costs with the ability to use off-the-shelf hardware rather than more expensive purpose-built appliances, and to virtualize some functions by running them in the cloud.
Nokia Siemens had previously done proof of concept projects for core virtualization that helped identify telecom-specific requirements for cloud computing. This round of testing was for verifying end-to-end VoLTE deployment readiness in a telcom-specific cloud environment, or what NSN is calling the Telco Cloud.
NSN said that it worked closely with major operators and technology partners to come up with use cases for testing, and that the tests included comprehensive end-to-end verification of LTE call cases to ensure parity with 2G/3G voice; Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC) functionality, and the re-use of existing billing, lawful interception and intelligent network interfaces.
“The range of test cases we ran during the pre-deployment verification phase underlines the essential role of the OSS components in the Telco Cloud,” said Peter Patomella, vice president of OSS at Nokia Siemens Networks. “We’ve shown how the complete lifecycle of a network element can be managed remotely via our OSS – including initial network element cloud deployment, monitoring of virtualized VoLTE application resources, and elasticity management.”
Michael Clever, VP of voice and IP transformation at NSN, called the testing “an important milestone in making the Telco Cloud a commercial reality for mobile broadband operators” and added that Nokia Siemens is “strongly committed to bringing our core network solutions to life in the Telco Cloud.”
