NFV to Cross the Chasm, Driving Network Transformation

NFV is expected to cross the chasm this year, moving into large-scale commercial use and facilitating cloud transformation, according to Gartner's Hype Cycle for Communications Service Provider Operations.

Jason Dai, Vice President of Huawei Packet Core Network Product Line

At the Huawei Global Analyst Summit 2017, Jason Dai, Vice President of the Huawei Packet Core Network Product Line, gave a speech entitled "Crossing the Chasm: Unleashing Network Transformation Potential". He elaborated on Huawei's latest progress in NFV architecture, technologies, and operation and Huawei's commercial experience in using the NFV solution to help carriers to move toward the cloud.

Cloud Native Architecture Makes Network Elastic, Robust and Agile

The Huawei NFV solution uses Cloud Native architecture to help carriers build elastic, robust, and agile cloud networks.

Elastic: The network-level distributed architecture is at the core of ensuring elasticity. Key technologies such as stateless design, control plane and user plane separation, and cross-DC deployment help to build service-aware networks. Resources can be provided on demand and the system capacity is not limited to a single hardware type. Network functions can be provided on demand to address a variety of requirements for applications.

Robust: Redundancy and smart operation are critical to ensuring robustness. Key technologies such as stateless design, N-way redundancy, cross-DC deployment, big data–based proactive fault location, and automatic closed loop control help to build decentralized, fault-tolerant, self-healing systems. Ultimately, an intelligent network delivers carrier-grade service reliability even over unreliable infrastructure.

Agile: Network slicing, service orchestration, and A/B test are the keys to ensuring agility. Key technologies such as microservices, data model driven, and service orchestration enable the flexible combination of network functions. As a result, new network services can be quickly released, and new functions and features can be customized, swiftly meeting the requirements of different industries. 

Advanced Technologies Optimize Cloud Network Performance

One of the challenges for carriers in deploying NFV is ensuring user-plane performance. As major contributors to open source and standards organizations such as ETSI, OPNFV, and OpenStack, Huawei has been researching the standards on network performance acceleration, and has made preliminary progress with partners. Huawei's NFV solutions take multiple measures to optimize the performance at the hardware, cloud OS, and VNF layers, finally improving the user-plane performance by three times.

Integration & OM Solutions Improve the Delivery and O&M Efficiency          

Huawei's end-to-end integration and O&M solutions cover evaluation, detection, design, and integration, providing cloud-based VNFs with carrier-grade reliability and openness. Hardware and software from multiple vendors can be quickly integrated. Huawei has established four NFV OpenLabs around the world, and has formed over 200 partnerships for verifying and testing NFV hardware and software integration. Vertical integration efficiency has been improved by about 70% due to the pre-integration, ensuring fast delivery of multi-vendor integration projects.

Carriers' O&M costs increase exponentially along with network scale. Huawei's NFV solutions use smart orchestration systems to automatically orchestrate services. The solutions also incorporate operation experience to provide automatic O&M, significantly improving O&M efficiency.

Rich Commercial-Use Experience Accelerates Cloud Transformation

As of January 2017, Huawei had won over 170 NFV commercial-use contracts for the cloud core network product line, 30 of which had been put into commercial use. Huawei's NFV solution was awarded the Best Technology Enabler at Mobile World Congress 2017, owing to its NFV architecture, technology, and commercial application. Huawei and its industry partners plan to continue pushing NFV industrial development forward to help more carriers transform toward the cloud.