4G era approaching Wind River OVP promotes base station Virtualization

In the last two years, with the rapid development of the mobile Internet, the original 3G network has been unable to meet the increasing business needs in terms of speed and capacity. All major operators have begun to prepare for the construction of 4G networks, in order to seize the lead in the new round of network construction. The State Council Executive Meeting recently explicitly stated that 4G licenses will be officially issued during the year, marking the official blow of China's 4G network construction.

China Telecom Network calls for virtualization technology

Compared with traditional 3G networks, the 4G standard supports wider bandwidth, larger capacity, and more complex protocols. In particular, to reduce mutual interference between cells and increase the rate of residential users, the 4G standard uses a large number of multi-cell collaboration technologies, which all increase the complexity of base station Baseband Processing, the device cost is increased accordingly.

Traditionally, wireless network base stations include equipment units and Baseband Processing Units. To ensure service quality, each base station must be equipped with sufficient Baseband Processing Units (BBU ), to meet the communication quality during business peaks. However, the distribution of wireless services in time and space also changes dynamically. Taking Beijing as an example, during work days, traffic is mainly concentrated in urban areas, such as international trade and Zhongguancun; night visits are mainly concentrated in residential concentration areas, such as Huilongguan and tiantongyuan. This non-uniformity of business distribution leads to expensive BBU being idle for some time periods, resulting in a certain degree of waste. Carriers around the world are looking to reduce costs and improve system performance and utilization.

As we all know, virtualization technology can effectively improve the utilization of system resources and has been widely used in the IT field. By utilizing the non-uniformity of the time and space distribution of network services, it centrally manages and schedules originally scattered server resources, effectively improving the utilization of computing and storage resources, this reduces management, maintenance, and operation costs.

However, virtualization technology in the IT field cannot be directly applied to telecom networks. This is mainly because the existing virtualization technology is difficult to achieve 99.9999% of the reliability required by the telecom network and the real-time performance required to support large-capacity base stations. virtualization technology needs to enter the telecom network, in terms of reliability and real-time performance, the standard of the existing Telecom Network must be met.

Fenghe OVP facilitates operator's network virtualization Layout

To meet the requirements of telecom networks for Virtualization, the world's leading embedded and mobile software provider American Wind River system company launched Open Virtualization Profile (OVP ), provides open-source high-performance Real-Time Kernel virtualization technology for the next generation of telecom devices, reducing latency to a very low level, and providing reliable performance to help operators anytime, anywhere as needed, flexibly and quickly deploy new applications and services, improve network utilization, and accelerate business development.

 

Figure 1 Wind River OVP Architecture

As shown in figure 1, The OVP architecture uses industry-standard server platforms (such as Intel blade servers) for baseband signal processing, eliminating the need to customize hardware devices and flexibly configuring CPU cores as needed, memory and other devices (USB, PCI, and Ethernet ports ). This also means that with the help of OVP, operators can centrally replace physical device functions in base stations to construct high-performance virtual nodes. In addition, when real-time migration and switching between nodes, OVP can ensure that the network pause time is as low as 500 milliseconds, ensuring efficient and dynamic resource scheduling.

Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Kernel-based Virtual Machine and virtualization solution) platform and its®With the tight integration of Data Plane Development Kit, Fenghe OVP enables quick context switching between different virtual machines, with a disconnection delay of less than 20 microseconds, almost close to local performance, it meets the real-time requirements of telecom networks. By binding virtual CPU and physical CPU, Fenghe OVP achieves multi-core processor system partitioning and isolation. Different applications run in isolated virtual machines to avoid cross-conflict when resources are called.

Fanwe OVP can optimize the performance of virtual machines and provide a management framework (OVirt/Openstack) to facilitate the establishment and management of cloud services. To facilitate network equipment vendors to develop products, OVP supports Open-source technologies such as Yocto Project Linux, KVM, OpenStack, Open vSwitch, OpenFlow, OpenDaylight, and Intel DPDK Accelerated Open vSwitch. It provides tools such as Prototype, Analyze, Diagnose, and Test, reduce customer development costs.

OVP supports deploying network services on virtual machines. After you develop production products, you can provide services at any location (from the access point to the kernel) in the network, the central management center can flexibly plan, deploy, and coordinate network resources as needed to improve cloud service capabilities.

Wind River OVP achieves base station Virtualization

With the development of data communication and multimedia services, operators are faced with performance and cost challenges. How to improve the utilization of network resources has become a real challenge. In particular, with the tide of 4G construction, how to improve the resource utilization of 4G base stations has become a challenge that operators have to face.

With the strength of the OVP real-time virtualization technology, the Wind River OVP product is selected as the software support for the cloud wireless access network solution, and the resource utilization is improved through centralized base stations ., This solution is based on Intel Server and Chipset for baseband processing. The software platform uses OVP to separate the RF remote pulling module RRU from the Baseband Processing Unit BBU, enabling dynamic calls of baseband processing resources, improves resource utilization and effectively reduces maintenance costs.

 

Figure 2 Structure of a cloud Wireless Access Network Based on Fenghe virtualization technology

Based on KVM's high-performance Virtual Switching Technology, OVP can ensure fast packet transmission and interrupt latency of less than 20 milliseconds to ensure that BBU requires strong real-time performance and efficient dynamic scheduling of base station resources. Earlier this year, in a demonstration project jointly conducted by Fenghe and Intel, LTE base stations using KVM technology achieved the same performance as traditional base stations.

Wide application of OVP

Wind River OVP enables customers to deploy network services on virtual machines, without performance degradation caused by traditional IT virtualization products, and application software isolation, isolate various execution environments and related data to ensure data security during running.

In addition to applications in telecom-grade networks, industries that require high real-time reliability, such as automobiles and healthcare, and new-generation product design and development based on open-source software in industrial and other industries, OVP can help customers gain more value.