BARCELONA -- At MWC 2018, Huawei announced the acceptance and release of the cloud-based broadband network gateway (BNG) with control plane and user plane (CU) separated architecture by the Broadband Forum (BBF) Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) in January 2018. The architecture, jointly proposed by China Mobile and Huawei, is now officially incorporated into the TR-384 specification (Cloud Central Office Reference Architectural Framework), providing an important reference for operators in reconstructing broadband network architectures. The announcement of this standard is a key milestone towards implementing cloud-based networks.

The TR-384 specification redefines metro networks based on a cloudified architecture. In TR-384, traditional network element (NE) functions are decoupled into the service control plane and user forwarding plane and implemented as virtualized network functions (VNFs) or high-performance hybrid physical network functions (PNFs). Cloud-based networks and existing networks can then be managed in hybrid mode to implement cloud-oriented migration and long-term evolution of devices on the live network, providing a reference for the evolution of operators' networks.

China Mobile and Huawei's contribution to TR-384 is the cloud-based BNG with CU-separated architecture. In this architecture, the traditional BNG is decoupled into separate control and forwarding planes. The centralized, cloud-based deployment of the service control plane facilitates the efficient utilization of network resources and provides highly scalable management capabilities for up to 10 million users. The user forwarding plane offloads heavy traffic onto a high-performance hardware forwarding plane deployed in distributed mode and processes low-traffic services with a large number of concurrent sessions on a centralized virtual forwarding plane.

China Mobile and Huawei have worked closely together to promote the mature commercial use of the cloud-based CU-separated BNG architecture. In February 2017, China Mobile Research Institute and Huawei jointly published the industry's first technical white paper on cloud-based BNG with control plane and user plane separated architecture at MWC 2017. In June 2017, Huawei and Shaanxi Mobile completed the world's first pilot of the CU-separated architecture on a live network, and Huawei explored visualized O&M and large-scale user deployment with Beijing Mobile and Zhejiang Mobile. On the eve of China Mobile Global Partner Conference in November 2017, Huawei released the cloud-based BNG capable of supporting 10 million users, leading the transformation towards metro network cloudification.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd