OREANDA-NEWS. NTT DOCOMO, INC., a personalized mobile solutions provider for smarter living, announced today that it has completed proof-of-concept (PoC) trials that have verified the feasibility of network functions virtualization (NFV) using the software and equipment of six world-leading ICT vendors - Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, and Nokia Networks.

The PoC trials will help to leverage technologies for next-generation virtualized mobile networks. Using the virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC), the core network of LTE systems, the trials successfully verified the interoperability of each vendor's EPC software with a different vendor's equipment, such as scalable data processing capability for congested data traffic and immediate network recovery in the event of hardware failure.

The verified technologies will enable communication software designed originally for dedicated hardware to run on multipurpose hardware. In the future, such technologies will allow mobile operators to combine network hardware and software components of any vendor for deployment of network systems.

Network virtualization is expected to offer key advantages, such as operational sustainability with improved connectivity for dense data traffic and during natural disasters, as well as in the event of hardware failure. It also will accelerate delivery of new services and drive more efficient infrastructure investment.

DOCOMO, as one of the founding member firms of the Open Platform for NFV, an open-source project formed last month, is teaming up with world-leading mobile operators and ICT vendors to support development of an open-source platform for virtualization. DOCOMO aims to utilize a virtualized mobile network for the commercial deployment of services by the fiscal year ending March 2016.