Alcatel-Lucent and China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile communications service provider, have conducted a field trial of a network functions virtualization (NFV)-based virtualized radio access network (vRAN) at Beijing’s Tisinghua University. Alcatel-Lucent claims to be the the first vendor in the industry to provide an operational vRAN solution in a campus environment supporting a large numbers of users.
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. 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.
According to Alcatel-Lucent, its 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. 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, said the company.
Dr. Chih-Lin I, Chief Scientist, China Mobile Research Institute
The vRAN technology will allow us to deliver new efficiencies across our network as our customers’ data demands change and more devices connect to our network. We are interested to see how the deployment of Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN will help us to smoothly evolve our networks to meet these demands.
Glenn Booth, SVP and General Manger, LTE Business Unit, Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent is committed to delivering the latest innovations that enable our customers to get the most out of their LTE networks and enable a smooth path to 5G. This trial is a prime example of how we are working with customers to develop, test and deploy networks with the highest performance and efficiencies and the lowest costs.
