OREANDA-NEWS. Telefonica and NEC Corporation announced their participation in the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress 2014, taking place in Swissotel, Dusseldorf, from 14 - 17 October 2014. The companies will be showing the deployment and orchestration of a residential virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) solution over the Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) Reference Lab platform launched by Telefonica earlier this year.

The vCPE solution was developed by Telefonica and NEC under a global framework commercial agreement signed by both companies. The vCPE solution enables certain IP functions to be shifted away from residential gateways towards a carrier's own network. Virtualisation of CPE minimizes network functionalities of home equipment, making the equipment simple, stable and enabling quick evolution supported by software inside an operator's network.

The demo will be on display at the Intel booth (number 39) in the main exhibition area of the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress 2014, and will demonstrate the feasibility of deploying and orchestrating a virtualized network function over Telefonica's NFV Reference Lab platform. This platform includes a simplified NFV orchestrator - aware of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) requirements - that enables a deterministic mapping of CPU and memory and a simplified VNF manager. This example of network creation and management based on a vCPE use case shows the possibility of doing automated deployments of virtualized network nodes and their interconnections over a NFV platform that enables a deterministic resource allocation to virtual machines which ensures a high and predictable performance.

Telefonica announced earlier this year the launch of its NFV Reference Lab to help its ecosystem of partners and network equipment providers (NEPs) test and develop virtual network functions along with upper service orchestration layers. This joint demo shows the cutting-edge work being developed by NEC, Telefonica and Intel in one of the most demanding and attractive network scenarios. The NFV platform used to set up this PoC is based on Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Intel(r) Xeon(r) processor E5-2600 servers, Intel(r) Data Plane Developer Kit (Intel(r) DPDK) and Intel(r) Niantic NICs, on Red Hat KVM environment and on Brocade switches.

Currently, the vCPE solution presented at the NFV PoC zone is being tested by NEC in the real network of Telefonica's Brazilian affiliate, VIVO, in an ongoing trial where economic benefits, network flexibility and user convenience is carefully being measured.

"This demo shows how the use case of residential vCPE is deployed and orchestrated in an NFV open platform as the one created in our NFV Reference Lab. We are confident that the deployment of vCPE will play a key role in our plans of virtualizing infrastructures in Telefonica, where the availability of NFV-ready baseline technologies will be essential," said Mr. Enrique Algaba, Director of Network Innovation at Telefonica I+D - Global CTO Unit.

"This ongoing vCPE project is based on our global agreement and is a major step towards network virtualization." said Mr. Atsuo Kawamura, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation. "NEC will fully support Telefonica in this transformation by providing an ecosystem solution that enables significant OPEX savings as well as allowing easy and quick deployment of new services. Telefonica and NEC will work together in the implementation of this vCPE solution and accelerate NFV across the industry."