China Mobile, GSMA, Huawei to address NFV reliability

China Mobile, the GSMA and Huawei have agreed during Mobile World Congress 2017 to jointly build an assessment framework for achieving carrier-grade NFV reliability.

The project aims to combine industry efforts to construct a scalable framework for NFV in telecoms networks enabling proactive, flexible and intelligent network maintenance.

Because of the difficulties surrounding locating network faults when using complex network technologies such as NFV, operators are looking to move towards a proactive network maintenance model to eliminate potential issues before user services are affected, the partners said.

GSMA technical director Michele Zarri commented that carrier-grade NFV-reliability is a critical aspect of the virtualization of mobile networks, and is in-line with the industry body’s 5G Network Virtualization project.

“There will be numerous business opportunities and challenges in the 5G era. However, Five-9s reliability is required for virtualized networks,” he said.

“The GSMA will work to define network requirements and formalize the assessment framework including metrics and measurements for achieving carrier-grade NFV reliability.”

Huawei GM for global customer support services Zhao Yongjun added that through the collaboration, the vendor aims “to consolidate industry efforts to explore new digital technologies and carry out joint-innovation to create tomorrow’s proactive intelligent network maintenance system.”

He said the system will support “real-time, intelligent perception and preventative measures to meet increasing ultra-reliable network requirements.”