–Cisco looked to put a cap on the rush towards virtualization at this week’s Mobile World Congress event with the launch of its Quantum Virtualized Packet Core software solution from its Evolved Services Platform that it said “virtualizes key capabilities” of its Aggregation Service Router 5000 Series and has passed portability testing with Berlin-based European Advanced Networking Test Center.
Cisco said the testing procedure involved LTE and 3G radio-access technologies using IPv4 and IPv6 and simulated the equivalent of 10,000 end users. The testing reportedly confirmed “that the virtualized and physical evolved packet core solution that supports the same features and functions as the Cisco Quantum VPC is completely hypervisor and hardware independent. The tests also confirmed that the Cisco Quantum CPC uses the same management software and interface that supports integrated services, such as network address translation, firewall and deep packet inspection.”
Cisco added that the testing confirmed that the same LTE and 3G calls that are supported by its ASR 5000 Series were also supported by the virtual implementation and “verified that functions “such as high availability with session recovery, deep packet inspection and firewall/network address translation worked as expected” in the virtual implementation.
Cisco explained that the testing showed that service providers currently running its ASR 5000 Series “can bypass the information technology integration costs normally associated with migration to a virtual environment,” extending the same code, functions and services to virtual implementations while continuing to work with existing ASR 5000 Series infrastructure.
–Amdocs launched its TeraScale big data solution that it claims is designed to manage and extract real-time charging usage data for analytical use cases. The offering, which is part of Amdocs’ CES 9.1 product suite, is based on the Hadoop ecosystem providing usage data modeling and embedded extract, transform and load processes.
Amdocs said the solution is capable of streaming usage data generated by its Convergent Charging product into data clusters providing granular data for analytics. TeraScale is designed to be deployed as a side-by-side solution alongside existing usage data storage and ETL solutions without impacting charging and billing operations.
“Amdocs TeraScale addresses the challenges facing service providers in the area of usage data today: how to cost-effectively store massive volumes of usage data; and how to unlock the value of usage data via analytics to drive better customer experience and to grow revenues,” said Justin van der Lande, principle analyst for analytics software strategies at Analysys Mason, in a statement from Amdocs. “With this new solution, Amdocs is evolving its customer experience systems portfolio to enable service providers to gain analytical insight they did not have before, based on real-time usage data, which paves the way towards new standards of operation and quality of service.”
–Openwave Mobility updated its congestion control software with the launch of DynaMO, which the company said includes full high-definition video and streaming audio optimization capabilities, and a reporting dashboard to measure traffic profile and savings. Openwave said the product is designed to help carrier manage bandwidth constraints created by mobile content formats like HD video and audio streaming.
Openwave explained that DynaMO uses a combination of “contextually-selective and congestion-aware optimization techniques” and adapts video optimization to fit the original video with each user’s device. The company claims operators can optimize audio streaming services by 30%, reducing radio-lag for on-demand music services.
Tapping into the growing move towards virtualization, Openwave said the platform can be deployed in a virtualized environment with “dynamic scaling that is fully aligned with the industry initiative for network function virtualization.”
–Aricent used the Mobile World Congress 2014 show to launch its IMSLite IP multimedia subsystem core software framework. The company said the product is a complete IP core network solution that enables IP calls, multimedia services and can be leveraged to support voice-over-LTE services.
Virtualized support is claimed through a “collapsed IMS core hosting proxy, interrogating and serving call session control functions” that can run on commercial hardware in a native Linux or virtualized environment with load balancers handling loads across multiple instances. Aricent noted these capabilities make the product ready for network function virtualization deployment.
The IMSLite product is targeted at “niche low- and mid-subscribers’ markets” including public safety and defense. The product can also be used with Aricent’s EPCLite evolved packet core software to provide support for a “network-in-a-box” solution.
Aricent also showed off its cloud-based virtual customer premise equipment framework, which is part of its NFV software solution. The company said the VCPE framework is based on its Intelligent Switching Solution and virtualizes several CPE network functions in a move to reduce the cost of a physical CPE.
The platform is designed to integrate with SDN, NFV and cloud architectures, and can run from a cloud environment as a virtualized application or on the edge routers as a service.
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