Leading metro network cloudification: Huawei releases cloud-based BNG capable of supporting 10 million users

[Guangzhou, China, December 1] At China Mobile Global Partner Conference, Huawei releases the world's first cloud-based Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) that can support service bearing for 10 million users. This solution redefines the BNG by cloud technology, and offers a control plane that can flexibly scale to provide resources for a vast number of users. This is a significant milestone in the solution's development, indicating its progress on the path to commercial use.

On current metro networks, BNGs are deployed in a distributed manner to handle bandwidth-heavy services such as video. As networks increase in scale and new services are introduced, however, this deployment model becomes unable to efficiently manage and rapidly troubleshoot network services. In that case, China Mobile and Huawei jointly proposed the cloud-based BNG with CU separation architecture to realize centralized management and flexible source scheduling to makes O&M much more convenient, which can centrally manage the user planes of the hundreds of devices in a city. The capability to provide bearing for a massive number of users is essential considering the hundreds of user planes managed on the solution's centralized control plane along with the large quantity of sessions required by IPTV, high-speed internet, VoIP, and other services. This is also a critical step on the cloud-based BNG's path to large-scale commercial use.

Huawei has leveraged its outstanding ability in architecture design and R&D to overcome the technical challenges with this cloud-based BNG solution, including elastic scaling of computing resources, unified management of data, and access for a large number of users. Its distributed control plane, multi-instance user management module that can perform load balancing, and elastic scaling based on user quantity give it the capability to provide service bearing for 10 million users and meet future development needs.

The cloud-based BNG solution not only can provide bearing for 10 million users on control plane and is compatible with the user planes of traditional physical devices as well as x86 commodity servers, which enables on-demand bearing for different services and smooth evolution in the future.

Huawei and China Mobile have engaged in close cooperation to innovate cloud-based BNG technology and push forward the commercial use. China Mobile and Huawei jointly released the first technical white paper on the cloud-based BNG with CU separation at the 2017 Mobile World Congress in February, and the companies have recently submitted multiple draft standards related to CU separation at the IETF as well. Huawei also worked with China Mobile Shaanxi in June to initiate the first trial of the technology on a live network and has been exploring the topics of visualized O&M and at-scale user deployment in collaboration with China Mobile Beijing and Zhejiang. Going forward, Huawei will continue to work with China Mobile to push forward the formulation of standards for CU separation and drive the BNG into the cloud era."