Huawei’s NFV solution has been awarded Best Technology Enabler at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona. This award points to the recognition within the industry of Huawei’s leading capabilities and outstanding performance in NFV architecture, technology, commercial application, and the evolution toward Cloud Native. Organized by the GSMA, Mobile World Congress is the world’s most influential event in the mobile communications sector, and the GSMA Global Mobile Awards are considered the highest honor within the industry.
Huawei hit the ground running by developing NFV solutions using the Cloud Native concept. Moving beyond basic virtualization, Cloud Native enables telecom networks to become fully distributed and automated, giving them greater elasticity, robustness, and agility. This helps operators enhance network efficient and deliver inspired user experiences, and enable agile innovation in services for better digital transformation.
Elastic: The Cloud Native network has a distributed architecture, so resources can be dynamically deployed wherever they are needed to support applications. It is a “sensing” network that recognizes the services deployed, and an elastic network that can adapt to support those services. There are two types of elasticity: capacity elasticity and topology elasticity.
Capacity elasticity means that all network resources are pooled. Network software can orchestrate any part of the fabric across multiple data centers, and capacity is no longer the bottleneck. Topology elasticity means the ability to deploy resources to any required geographical location, enabled by control/user plane separation and service orchestration.
Robust: An intelligent network builds in robustness at the network and service levels. The network is decentralized, with stateless elements, N-way redundancy, and inter-DC service provisioning. Active fault injection, monitoring, and self-healing processes are combined with big data analysis and management of services, enabling fault prediction and automated controls.
Ultimately, an intelligent network delivers carrier-class service reliability even over unreliable infrastructure.
Agile: Agility means service orchestration + programmability + ISSU (in service software upgrade). Flexible service assembly, service autonomy, and distributed deployment are achieved by decomposing network functions into microservices, and applying a service governance framework, data model, and a programmable user interface. Services and new functions can be delivered as needed, so the network can instantly respond to the needs of very different services required by different industries.
Using key Cloud Native technologies, Huawei has already rolled out its Cloud Native VNF solution, which has been widely adopted on core networks. Huawei remarked at MWC 2017 that the company will continue to optimize solutions revolving around service needs, and through such efforts will help to build 5G and better connected agile networks.
As of January 2017, Huawei had won over 170 contracts for cloud core networks. In addition, Huawei is a strategic partner and co-innovator with Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and other global leading operators on their Cloud Native strategies. At MWC 2017, Huawei presented a Cloud Native demonstration developed with Vodafone. Looking to the future, Huawei will continue to help operators build more open, more innovative, more sustainable ecosystems around their Cloud Native networks, with the aim of creating more new services and more value.
