Beijing, November 4, 2019 – With the advent of the 5G commercial era, business needs and technological innovation have put forward higher requirements for 5G cloud networks. How to realize the deep unification of cloud and network collaboration has become an urgent problem to be solved. To this end, during the 2019 China International Information and Communication Exhibition (PT EXPO CHINA 2019) hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group and Intel jointly organized a 5G event with the theme of “Openness, Convergence and Intelligence”. The Cloud-Network Integration Technology Forum focuses on the current situation and development of the 5G cloud-network field.
“2019 is known as the first year of global 5G commercial use, and my country also officially issued 5G commercial licenses on June 6 this year. As of September, the three major telecom operators have opened 86,000 5G base stations, which are expected to reach 86,000 by the end of the year. 130,000.” Yang Hongmei, chief engineer of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, as the forum moderator, used a set of data to show the speed of 5G commercialization this year. She believes: “At the same time as the rapid and large-scale deployment of 5G networks, the industry chain also pays great attention to the in-depth integration of 5G and vertical industries, and empowers vertical industries through open, integrated and intelligent 5G cloud network infrastructure.” From operators, research Important guests from institutions, telecom operators, equipment and solution providers took to the stage to give speeches one after another, discussing the advanced technologies of 5G cloud-network integration and sharing successful experiences.
Promote network transformation and accelerate cloud-network integration
In recent years, with the active innovation in the global cloud computing field and my country’s cloud computing development entering the stage of application popularization, more and more enterprises have begun to use cloud computing technology to deploy information systems, and enterprises’ awareness and capabilities of cloud computing have been continuously enhanced. In order to ensure the normal progress of enterprise cloud migration, enterprises have new demands on the network. In this context, cloud-network integration emerges as the times require.
“Cloud-network integration has become an innovative opportunity for the development of the ICT industry. The world’s mainstream telecom operators are relying on their original advantages to innovate products, technologies and services around network intelligence, flattening, automation, and edge-cloud collaboration.” China Zhang Haiyi, deputy director of the Institute of Standards, Information and Communication Research Institute, said when talking about cloud-network integration: “5G will play a huge role in the field of edge-cloud collaboration. By providing flexible and controllable network transmission capabilities, it will open up capabilities and edge intelligence. Further extend the value chain of 5G.”
As an important partner in the industry, Intel, together with a wide range of partners such as operators, promotes the development of cloud native, 5G base station cloudification, 5G core network virtualization and other technological trends, and supports the future trend of telecom infrastructure towards openness, cloudification and intelligence advance. “5G is here, and the edge is at the center of new services and innovation. Intel is committed to network transformation and cloudification, and we are delivering leading-edge products for 5G infrastructure and the edge. Let’s work together to realize the full potential of 5G.” Intel Data Rajesh Gadiyar, Vice President of the Central Business Unit and Chief Technology Officer of the Network and Custom Logic Business Unit, mentioned Intel’s advantages in the 5G era when delivering a speech with the theme of “Realizing 5G Challenges and Opportunities”, accelerating industrial transformation and boosting the implementation of applications.
Udayan Mukherjee, Intel academician and chief technical expert of network infrastructure of the Network Platform Division, also believes that network virtualization and cloudification have become inevitable choices in the 5G era. On the one hand, on the core network side, 5GC based on the NFV concept has crossed the watershed. It has become the mainstream choice in the industry; on the other hand, on the wireless access network side, the operator group represented by China Mobile also proposed the O-RAN concept, which pointed out the direction for the industry chain, but there is still a long way to go. Uncompromising performance, focusing on optimizing and promoting RAN to open source and cloudification, and long-term cooperation between Intel and its partners, 5G business value is fully exploited.
In this regard, Udayan Mukherjee mentioned the case of providing technical support for Rakuten, a leading Internet service manufacturer, to build a new cloud-native network. The network enables complete virtualization from the radio access network (RAN) to the core network, and uses an innovative 5G system architecture that provides end-to-end automation for both the network and the service, serving millions of users in Japan. In the world’s first end-to-end virtualized cloud-native mobile network cooperation case, Yunda Technology also participated. Li Jiarui, the company’s associate manager, mentioned in the performance that in order to give full play to the value and advantages of cloud-native architecture, it is necessary to The infrastructure must be fully shared. At present, Yunda Technology is carrying out in-depth cooperation with Intel, especially at the fully decoupled RAN level, to achieve flexible scheduling of cloud resources through fully decoupled RAN.
World-renowned telecom operators such as South Korea’s SK Telecom and Intel also have very close cooperation. “SK Telecom has used Intel’s chips and technologies to rebuild the end-to-end data pipeline architecture. By comparing the old and new systems, the performance of the new architecture has improved several times.” In HongChan Roh’s speech, with more than 300,000 SK Telecom with 27 million base stations and Intel can effectively improve performance in practical applications. He also said that with the help of network quality analysis and prediction accelerated by Intel technology, artificial intelligence will be used to empower 5G networks.
As Wang Feng, head of the server working group of the Open Data Center Committee (ODCC), said: “In the process of network cloudification, the reconstruction of the general underlying hardware infrastructure is directly related to the success or failure of commercial operations.” No matter how 5G develops, hardware performance The advantages and disadvantages of cloud network integration and rapid deployment of 5G network are the key.
Duan Ran, deputy director of the Green Communication Technology Research Center of China Mobile Research Institute and head of the China Mobile O-RAN project, introduced the focus and progress of the O-RAN alliance in his speech. As a member of the O-RAN Alliance, Intel fully supports ORAN partners to realize the core principles of ORAN intelligence and openness.
From edge to cloud, realizing openness, integration and intelligence
The role of edge computing in the 5G era has become more and more prominent. Yang Fengyi, 5G R&D Center of China Telecom Research Institute, and Chen Dan, senior director of edge computing of China Unicom Group, interpreted the importance of MEC in 5G network deployment from the perspective of operators. The former believes that , MEC is the core technical means for 5G network to enable vertical industries, and it is the promoter of the integration of the telecommunications industry and various industries, and it is worthy of long-term continuous promotion. The latter said that as the anchor of 5G, MEC is the expansion and extension of the communication network, which can realize the true integration of CT network capabilities and IT business capabilities.
From the perspective of the specific deployment actions of operators, with the support of Intel and other partners, China Telecom has established an MEC open laboratory. Yang Fengyi said that in the future, he will continue to explore the MEC white box station and the combination of MEC and white box station. China Unicom’s MEC business operation center has officially settled in Guangdong, which can provide edge business support, service support, marketing support and other functions to the whole country. Previously, China Unicom and Intel launched the MEC ecological partner open platform, and held the “First MEC Edge Cloud Service Developer Training Camp” last week, which has received wide attention and recognition from the industry. The OTII edge-customized server released by China Mobile based on the Intel CPU platform and China Unicom’s nationwide MEC edge cloud scale pilot have achieved good results.
ZTE, whose MEC edge computing solution has been widely piloted around the world, is also very interested in this deployment. Zhu Kun, chief architect of edge computing at ZTE, said: “With the advent of the 5G era, the three scenarios are gradually being implemented. On the edge side, since the best compromise between cost, computing power and delay is achieved, the business demands of cost reduction and delay reduction are like water flow, all converge on edge nodes, and edge computing has become a hot spot of 5G. .”
This year’s MWC Shanghai, Comba Telecom, together with China Mobile and Intel, released the industry’s first commercial 5G small cell, which is a scalable 5G small cell with a three-level architecture, which has attracted widespread attention in the industry. Yu Jitao, chief R&D engineer of Comba Telecom Network Products Division, said in his speech: “Small cells are very dependent on the continuous evolution of chips and protocol stacks. From the perspective of the underlying architecture, Intel’s GPP solution has a relatively high product maturity. Comba also chose to cooperate with Intel.”
During the exhibition, Intel not only showcased the practical application of 5G + edge computing + industrial Internet, 5G smart venues, smart construction sites, cloud games, Internet of Vehicles and other innovative applications, but also joined hands with partners to showcase cloud solutions for 5G base stations, 5G core network Intel’s 5G network cloud-to-end products and solutions such as virtualization solutions and 5G network acceleration solutions. For example, Comba 5G open platform small base station adopts the Intel FlexRAN wireless platform software framework, combined with Intel Xeon D processor and Intel Stratix 10 FPGA acceleration card high-performance hardware platform; China Unicom CubeEdge MEC platform adopts the second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel OpenNESS (Open Network Edge Service Software), Intel OpenVINO Toolkit, etc.; Advantech NFVI and uCPE hardware solutions all use Intel processors.
As an important participant and key promoter of 5G, Intel focuses on 5G network transformation and cloudification, an important field with unlimited potential, and works with industry partners to promote the application and innovation of 5G in vertical fields. By converging communications and computing, Intel is leading the transformation of 5G’s transformative technology to drive the smart, connected world of tomorrow.
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