Huawei has deployed the “world’s first” commercial software-defined network with Beijing Telecom and held a range of tests of TD-LTE Advanced with China Mobile, which it said will ultimately improve performance of the technology.
The vendor said the SDN technology was deployed in Beijing Telecom’s internet data centre and comprises the likes of a smart network controller, which was powered by Huawei’s Flow Engine control algorithm. It also used its NetMatrix orchestration system, which implements intelligent traffic optimisation for data centre egress nodes. Huawei said the software “greatly enhances resource efficiency and user experience”.
Beijing Telecom, the trading name of the Beijing wing of China Telecom, said the new technology will allow it to offer new products based on bandwidth and value added services. Among the new products it is offering are virtual resource services, assurance services, traffic reporting, as well as offering custom services.
Xu Hong, Vice GM of Beijing Telecom, said: “We are glad to cooperate with Huawei in the SDN field and successfully commercialise the technology. We hope these new services can create more value for our customers.”
Huawei is one of several vendors working with Spanish carrier Telefónica on its Unica network virtualisation project. The operator is aiming to have 30 percent of its network infrastructure digitised by 2016.
Meanwhile, Huawei has held multiple tests of TD-LTE Advanced with China Mobile, which it said will lead to a refining of the technology. The vendor conducted a field test of FDD/TDD carrier aggregation, multi-stream aggregation (MSA), inter-site CoMP and Mu-Mimo at Chengdu Electronic Technology University. The tests used LTE TDD are the primary cell and FDD as the secondary, achieving speeds of 250MBps.
The MSA tests involved both TDD and FDD sites and Huawei said the results showed flexible handover in terms of network coverage, load and interference.
Its Mu-Mimo tests doubled peak data rates by using four data streams on an eight antenna network. By using inter-site CoMP on a PTN-based network, the companies increased cell-edge throughput by more than 30 percent. Huawei and China Mobile also tested 256QAM technology, both indoors and outdoors, and said it had a 33 percent peak data rate gain compared to 64QAM and improved cell performances of more than 20 percent indoors.
Huawei said the tests, which are part of the 3GPP R12 standards, would accelerate the development “and speed up scale for commercial use of these technologies”.
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