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Ericsson, AT&T demo virty mobile signalling

Carrier SDN / NFV on the way

Ericsson and AT&T have reportedly showed off the next fruit of their cloudy SDN-for-carriers research partnership, demonstrating mobile multimedia control functions operating in a virtualised environment.

It's a significant step forward in the carrier network, since CSCF (call session control function) is a key control function for mobile multimedia operations, processing the SIP (session initiation protocol) signalling packets in the mobile IMS (IP media subsystem).

As BusinessCloudNews reports, the point of the demo at this stage was to show that a VM-based implementation of CSCF would be useful in keeping a network operational if the hardware that usually implements the function goes awry.

In the demo, AT&T's Toby Ford told BCN the demo is a prototype that runs a virtual network function on OpenStack, set up a multimedia session and demonstrated “some of the high availability features needed for telco applications”.

The CSCF VM was provisioned using Ericsson's Cloud Execution Environment Platform, with its Cloud Manager handling orchestration.

It's part of an Ericsson push to virtualise as many of its network functions as possible by 2016. Back in February, Ericsson and AT&T first announced they were working together on SDN technologies, with the US carrier nominating the Scandinavian outfit to help create “user-defined cloud” services. The two outfits were also founding members of the Linux Foundation's OPNFV (Open Network Function Virtualisation) push.

OPNFV is in the midst of a meetup at the OpenStack summit in Paris.

In a separate announcement Ericsson and TIBCO have entered a partnership, under which TIBCO's middleware is going to get added to Ericsson's OSS/BSS (operational support system / business support system) software. ®

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