ZTE releases ten million users access vBRAS solution

Leading MAN Virtualization

24 November 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today released the industry's first vBRAS solution at the China Mobile Global Partner Conference 2017 held in Guangzhou. The solution supports ten million users’ access simultaneously based on the C/U (Control/User) separated architecture

The solution decouples the software from the hardware on the control plane through the NFV (Network Function Virtualization) technology, realizing centralized management and virtualization of the control plane by integrating user management functions of multiple BRAS devices. The self-developed distributed CDB (Cloud Data Base) overcomes the performance difficulty in massive user data synchronization and backup that ordinary vBRAS solutions cannot solve. Capable of supporting ten million users access, the solution effectively improves the utilization efficiency of network resources and reduces the difficulty in operation and maintenance.

Currently, with the rapid growth of home broadband users and fast development of new services such as 4K, cloud services and Internet of Things, the traditional BRAS devices are confronted with enormous challenges. Located at the MAN edge, the BRAS device is a physical connection point between the broadband access network and metro backbone network. At the same time, it is a policy execution point to control user broadband services. As an ingress for the user to access network services, the BRAS is a control node of all network services. However, the traditional BRAS solution has its control and forwarding planes tightly coupled, which causes unbalanced resource distribution and low resource utilization. Besides, it has independent and scattered configurations, which cause complicated O&M. Moreover, new service launching involves the software upgrade of multiple devices in the network, consuming a lot of time and efforts.

The ZTE vBRAS solution based on virtualized C/U separated cloud network architecture can solve the above problems easily. First of all, the C/U separated vBRAS adopts the IT technology to enable control plane resource pooling and on-demand flexible scaling, meeting CT carrier-grade reliability and mass session requirements. The control plane of the core device of the solution ZXR10 V6000 vBRAS employs the self-developed distributed CDB to solve the performance bottleneck problem of massive user data synchronization and backup. It enables accessing ten million users and dynamic flexible scaling based on the network scale.

Meanwhile, the ZTE vBRAS adopts the distributed CDB active/standby realtime synchronization mechanism to achieve cross-DC user data hot-standby. Specifically when the vBRAS control plane malfunctions in a single DC, the users can smoothly migrate their services to the control plane of the standby vBRAS without redialing or any effect on services. In addition, the control plane of the vBRAS supporting ten million users access has the user dialing processing rate and user entry distribution rate matching its capacity. ZTE adopts the cloud computing technology and distributed processing mechanism to increase the traditional BRAS user dialing rate by 10 times and the online rate to over 10,000 pieces per second; and the user entry distribution rate rises to over 40,000 pieces per second. It has significantly reduced response time and improved user experience.

Up to now, ZTE has completed trials of the C/U separated vBRAS in the existing networks across more than ten provinces of China, including Guangdong, Jiangsu, Henan, Jiangxi, Sichuan and Fujian.