BARCELONA,Spain---February 26, 2018---China Unicom and Baicells has jointly developed 4G based virtualized wireless system in 2017 and will keep R&D cooperation towards 5G NR/NGC in 2018.
In the collaboration of RAN NFV (Virtualized RAN), China Unicom, Baicells, and Radisys had shown a live demo in PTEXPO 2017 for higher layer split (Option-2: PDCP/RLC) of LTE CU/DU based on vRAN and vEPC. This demo has proven the concept of China Unicom led SI (Study on Architecture Evolution for E-UTRAN) in 3GPP. In 2018, as the standardization ready for 5G NR, higher layer split of NR CU/DU will be jointly developed as well as the support for NSA (non-standalone access) by dual connectivity between 4G and 5G.
For core network cooperation, China Unicom and Baicells have deployed the first M-CORD prototype system in China 2017. This system is based on CORD 4.1 ——the latest version from On.Lab community. The M-CORD prototype system deployed by China Unicom and Baicells has characteristics of open-source mobile infrastructure, open-source control and management, and open-source compute platform. Up till now, two forms have been realized including CORD-in-a-box and CORD in physical POD. It could flexibly realize the requirement from mobile network, especially suitable for edge-cloud that China Unicom has been promoting. Base on the M-CORD platform, China Unicom and Baicells will further explore virtualized RAN supporting CU/DU split and NSA, End-to-End network slicing, network capability exposure, network monitoring analysis, service deployment and so on.
“As 5G is approaching, these trials towards 5G network architecture will support China Unicom to explore 5G network evolvement, open-source community construction, network capability exposure.” said Dr. Tang Xiongyan, CTO of Network Technology Research Institute, China Unicom. He showed good faith in 5G’ approaching.
Sun Lixin, Baicells CEO, stated:“The trend of future network will be virtualization. We believe in 5G era, more applications will run on the open platform with higher efficiency and flexibility.”