Nokia Siemens Networks reported progress in its efforts to deliver mobile voice core services via a virtualized telco cloud core. The company, which previously has demonstrated various use cases covering Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and other IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based services in the Telco Cloud, said the technology is now on the brink of commercial deployment.
The latest progress includes further testing to verify end-to-end VoLTE deployment readiness in a Telco Cloud. This testing involved end-to-end verification of VoLTE call cases to ensure feature parity with customers’ current 2G/3G circuit-switched voice services, Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC) functionality, and the reuse of existing billing, lawful interception and intelligent network interfaces.
During 2012, Nokia Siemens Networks demonstrated the reliability of core virtualization in several “proof of concept” projects. The company said these projects provided the technology foundation for core network element software running on top of a virtualized infrastructure. In addition, the projects helped identify telco-specific requirements for cloud computing. The testing used industry-standard virtualization and cloud management infrastructure as well as commercial off-the-shelf IT server hardware.
Specifically, NSN’s test program for Telco Cloud deployment verified:
- automated deployment and elastic scaling of virtualized network elements
- live migration of virtual machines from one server to another,
- recovery from hardware failures.
“The range of test cases we ran during the pre-deployment verification phase underlines the essential role of the OSS components in the Telco Cloud,” said Peter Patomella, vice president, Operations Support Systems at Nokia Siemens Networks. “We’ve shown how the complete lifecycle of a network element can be managed remotely via our OSS – including initial network element cloud deployment, monitoring of virtualized VoLTE application resources, and elasticity management.”
