OREANDA-NEWS. Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) and China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile communications service provider, have conducted the industry’s first field trial of a virtualized radio access network-based architecture based on network functions virtualization (NFV) technology.

The trial – carried out at Beijing’s Tisinghua University - demonstrated the flexibility, scalability, cost and energy-efficiency of Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN and NFV technologies for meeting the dynamically changing demands for access from an ever increasing number of applications and devices, people and machines. This is also an important step in the path towards 5G networks.

It is expected that the Internet of Things and millions of people connecting to the Internet for the first time will place huge demands on mobile networks over the coming years, with data traffic predicted to increase almost tenfold between 2014 and 2019 . To manage this increase, China Mobile is preparing for the evolution to 5G, which promises greater network convergence, better spectral efficiency, support for more users, higher data rates and a more consistent user experience.

In the trial Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN technology was deployed throughout the 442 hectares of Beijing’s Tisinghua University campus, one of the leading universities in China with approximately 57,000 students and teachers. The trial provided both indoor and outdoor coverage and demonstrated the flexibility of the vRAN network, including its ability to dynamically scale network resources in response to traffic demands by the users across the campus.

Key Facts:

  • Alcatel-Lucent is the first vendor to provide an operational vRAN solution in a campus environment supporting large numbers of users. 
  • Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN technology:
    • offers the ability to flexibly scale and perform load balancing and real-time migration across network resources to allow service providers like China Mobile to lower costs.
    • allows for increased spectral efficiency with less interference - especially for heterogeneous networks built with multiple radios and radio technologies.
    • enables enhanced cell site coordination to increase network performance and the capability to host latency sensitive applications at the edge.
  • By deploying an NFV-based RAN platform, service providers can lay the foundation for supporting multiple access technologies, such as LTE, LTE-Advanced and Wi-Fi, while providing an evolution path to 5G and accelerating time-to-market for new, revenue-generating services.
  • Since the China Mobile Research Institute introduced the concept of C-RAN to the industry five years ago, China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent have worked closely to develop innovative technology for future radio access networks. Joint work in NFV, and particularly on the vRAN, will help operators to smoothly evolve and meet growing customer demands with a more efficient and effective network structure.