| | April 20158CIOReviewopinionin myThe Reality ofVirtualizingMobile Networks By, Kalyan Sundhar, VP- Mobility, Assessment, Virtualization and Media, IxiaKalyan SundharVirtualization is a revolution that is starting to transform the industry and will help the operators optimize their costs with an elastic and scalable network that can deploy services in a flexible manner at a much faster pace than todayVirtualization enables the operators at the top of the food chain to bring in best-of-breed solutions from vendors without tying themselves to dedicated vendor hardware. It is a revolution that is starting to trans-form the industry and over the next several years, this will help the operators optimize their costs with an elastic and scalable network that can deploy services in a flexible manner at a much faster pace than today. This is es-pecially important for mobile operators who invest a great deal of resources to rollout new networks. So why not, have the new rollouts be more virtual?Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are at the forefront of virtualization. NFV allows services and other upper layer functions to be deployed as Virtual Network Functions (VNF) residing in virtual machines (VM). SDN controllers are expected to result in multi-billion dollars of OPEX savings for operators by dynamically managing traffic and backhaul bandwidth. LTE networks are functionally split into an E-UTRAN (Radio access Network), EPC (evolved packet core), and policy, identity and charging infrastructure.Virtualizing the LTE EPC LTE EPC consists of several distinct components all interconnected via high speed Gigabit 10G/40G+ Eth-ernet links. In the non-virtualized networks deployed today, these functional compo-nents are housed in indi-vidual, dedicated custom hardware provided by vendors. To move these distinct components to a virtual platform, each of these "functions" can be host-ed in one or more VMs, deployed on the same physical COTS server or
< Page 7 | Page 9 >