Recently, ETSI hosted a telco cloud-native roundtable at MWC Shanghai 2023. Duan Xiaodong, Vice President of China Mobile Research Institute, delivered a keynote speech. In his speech, he shared China Mobile's experience and achievements in network cloud construction, and proposed thoughts and suggestions on the future of NFV.
Duan Xiaodong, Vice President of China Mobile Research Institute, delivering a keynote speech
According to Duan Xiaodong, China Mobile's NFV journey has undergone three phases: exploration, construction, and in-depth integration with computing power. In late 2012, China Mobile signed the first whitepaper on NFV with twelve leading telecom operators. After five years of Proof of Concept (PoC), China Mobile started large-scale NFV commercial construction in 2018. Then, skipping 5G NSA, China Mobile adopted 5G SA in 2020 with its 5G core network 100% carried on the NFV network cloud. On top of that, China Mobile introduced diversified computing power with both x86 and Arm servers, paving the way for building an NFV network suitable for large-scale growth.
Duan pointed out that China Mobile, as one of the earliest and key advocates of the NFV initiative, has been deeply engaged in the NFV field over the past decade, with many useful practices and contributions:
First, China Mobile applied the NFV concept to build the world's largest commercial network, creating a blueprint for the industry and driving forward the progress of 4G and 5G communications.
Second, China Mobile implemented three-layer decoupling deployment with ICT convergence technologies to ensure usability and reliability (redundancy). In addition, China Mobile made progresses in diversified computing power to counteract related challenges.
Third, China Mobile has established an agile capability system (CI-CT-CD) and developed the infrastructure automation platform, "AUTO Xing Yun", filling the gap in NFV development.
Fourth, China Mobile continuously contributes to open source communities and standardization, jointly initiating three major NFV open source projects: OPNFV, ONAP, and Anuket.
Duan concluded that NFV technologies are still facing challenges in resource utilization improvement, agile rollout of network functions, public capability openness and sharing, and service innovation. In the future, China Mobile will further strengthen NFV based on cloud native and unleash the power of emerging technologies including the computing power networks and 6G, opening up infinite possibilities for the industry.