Spirent Communications, the carrier network and SDN/NFV testing solution provider, has participated in the performance testing showcase for China Mobile’s 5G C-RAN programme at Mobile World Congress (MWC 2018) in Barcelona. Spirent and China Mobile jointly demonstrated testing and assessment results that reflect the overall status of virtualisation platforms in the industry, as well as the maturity of NFV infrastructure (NFVi) in supporting 5G C-RAN capabilities. The effort also provided a solid foundation for large scale field tests of 5G by China Mobile during 2018.
The test covered NFV infrastructure platforms from eight major providers, including mainstream communications equipment manufacturers and IT vendors, and provided a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of mainstream virtualisation platforms in the industry, as well as the technological evolution of 5G wireless commercial platforms.
In the testing process, Spirent NFVi automated test solution was used to significantly improve the testing cycle for NFVi platforms with testing approaches involving automated orchestrations and optimisations.
“The tests demonstrated that the wireless cloud platform is capable of supporting 5G wireless commercial service deployments and is able to provide high quality services for wireless services in areas like carrier capacities, throughput and latency, providing assurance for the commercial implementation of 5G cloud base stations,” says Dr. Yi Zhiling, chief scientist of China Mobile Research Institute. “We are looking forward to more partners joining our C-RAN research studying the maturity of 5G C-RAN technologies.”
Spirent’s NFVi performance test and evaluation system is fully-automated and adopted to an NFVi platform based on OpenStack architecture. It enables users to perform comprehensive assessment of the network performance of NFVi cloud platforms with Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) acceleration.
Through isolated testing on VNF and NFVi, the Spirent solution can find the root cause of performance problems during the decoupling process of NFV, helping industrial users to accelerate the execution of system regression tests while reducing the complexity of NFVi testing.
The test system not only supports network performance testing in VLAN and VxLAN network deployments, but also includes performance testing modules related to CPU, memory and disk access, and provides remote test execution support.
“In the China Mobile 5G C-RAN program, Spirent’s Professional Service team provided support through automated orchestration and rational testing methodologies, helping to optimise the NFVi platform testing cycle.” said Wu Jie, director of APAC Sales Development, Spirent Communications..
“Spirent worked closely with China Mobile 5GC-RAN Task Group and developed a dedicated NFVi automated performance testing system which greatly improved the efficiency of traditional NFVi performance testing and helped provide the foundation for the deployment and planning of the overall program.”
“As a long-term testing partner of China Mobile, Spirent’s expertise will facilitate China Mobile’s 5G C-RAN program and help contribute to the maturity of the C-RAN industry and commercialisation of C-RAN equipment.”
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