South Korean Operator, SK Telecom in partnership with Ericsson has completed what it claims as the world's first demonstration of the new Software-Defined Telecommunications Infrastructure (SDTI) technology. The technology was demonstrated last week at the 5G Playground, the company's 5G technology innovation centre located in Bundang, south of Seoul.
SDTI refers to an infrastructure platform where network components such as CPU, memory and storage are disaggregated as customizable modules. As a result, they can be dynamically composed to meet the scale requirements of various 5G services, while enabling high-quality user experiences, faster service rollout and increased efficiency.
The demonstration used Ericsson Hyperscale Datacenter System (HDS) 8000 - a new generation of hyperscale datacenter system based on the Intel® Rack Scale Architecture. According to Ericsson, SDTI is a key enabler of 5G network slicing, whereby a virtualized network is created and optimized for a particular user or service. The demonstration focused on two use cases - ultra-micro-network end-to-end (E2E) slicing for personalized services, and ultra-large-network E2E slicing for high-capacity processing.
By the end of 2016, Ericsson and SK Telecom plan to deploy and verify an end-to-end 5G pilot system consisting of 5G devices, radio and core networks, and SDTI.
Park Jin-hyo, SVP and Head of Network Technology R&D Center, SK Telecom
SDTI is an innovative technology that enhances network efficiency by flexibly constructing hardware components to satisfy the infrastructure performance requirements of diverse 5G services.
Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO, Ericsson
We are pleased to jointly develop this SDTI technology based on Ericsson HDS 8000. Ericsson will continue to lead 5G innovation and commercialization in collaboration with SK Telecom.