Telco Cloud: Meeting the OTT Challenge

Why Telco Cloud?

For many years, the telecom industry has been challenged by over-the-top (OTT) providers who have usurped the basic voice and message services of operators. Because FTTX and HSPA+ have been widely deployed and LTE and WiFi networks offer better wireless coverage, multimedia communication using intelligent terminals has developed rapidly. According to industry analysts, iMessage and WhatsApp will replace traditional SMS and MMS services within two years, and VoIP services such as FaceTime and Skype will replace traditional voice services when LTE becomes more popular.

A telecom network is highly reliable, interoperable, and has high QoS. It supports emergency calls and other communication specifications. The standard interfaces and open architecture of a telecom network create a good environment for future expansion. IMS allows unique convergence and seamless handover between fixed and mobile, narrowband and broadband, and voice and multimedia. This cannot be achieved by OTT applications that rely simply on broadband access. Compared with free OTT services, telecom services based on traditional telecom technologies are inefficient and costly. Communication technologies, therefore, have to be reformed, and telco cloud has to be incorporated into product development and network construction.

Advantages of Telco Cloud

Telco cloud is a cloud platform designed for telecom applications. It has large capacity and is scalable. It is 99.999% reliable, has N+K redundancy, and can be smoothly upgraded. Apps built on the cloud platform meet carrier-class requirements.

Using distributed computing and virtualization, telco cloud makes it easy for apps to be migrated, copied, and regenerated. This increases the reliability of telecom applications on the cloud platform. Telco cloud also optimizes signaling/session control, media resources, and real-time processing. This guarantees quality of service for users.

Telco cloud supports ultra-large user data center, IP and TDM-based service processing, and SLA (such as resource reservation and fault isolation) to ensure normal service and response times and timely system recovery.

Telco cloud has the basic features of a common cloud platform. It supports IT service applications by using virtualization and is a network infrastructure that separates telecom applications, such as CS, IMS, UDC, VAS, NMS and BSS/OSS, from the telecom infrastructure. In this way, operators can dynamically allocate resources to applications as required. This improves infrastructure use and significantly reduces costs.

Tulip Elastic Computing System

ZTE’s tulip elastic computing system (TECS) is a carrier-class cloud computing IaaS platform based on virtualization. It divides physical hardware such as CPU, memory and storage into several isolated virtual machines. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems, and multiple service systems share the basic physical platform. This improves resource utilization, simplifies equipment room structure, and protects operator investment. TECS supports

●   carrier-class computing and storage devices (ATCA/ETCA) and third-party universal computing and storage devices

●   multiple operating systems

●  computing, network and storage virtualization as well as related virtual resource management.

zVOA

In 2011, ZTE launched a voice and video over any access solution (zVOA). It is a TESC-based, converged CS/IMS solution that allows a traditional network to seamlessly evolve to VoLTE and full-service operation.

Mobile operators currently use CS+IMS dual-core mode in their core network architecture. They use a mobile softswitch network to provide voice, SMS, and USSD services for 2G/3G terminals and an IMS network to deliver multimedia services to 3.5G, LTE, and WiFi broadband terminals. According to 3GPP standards, CS will evolve to an access network of IMS. Because evolving mobile networks from 2G/3G to 4G is a long process, CS and IMS networks will coexist for a long time, and CS+IMS dual-core mode will certainly result in high operation costs.

zVOA converges CS softswitch and IMS on a telco cloud platform. With standard 3GPP architecture, zVOA enables public hardware and system processing capability to be shared. System processing capability can be shared by both Softswitch and IMS domains. zVOA helps operators simply and quickly deploy VoLTE and VoBB in the initial stage of network construction. When CS users migrate to IMS, system capacity can be upgraded smoothly. zVOA is used to migrate voice traffic from traditional terminals to intelligent terminals. zVOA is designed to provide a low-cost, converged voice and multimedia solution that is easy to maintain and expand. It helps operators smoothly deploy VoLTE, VoBB, and multimedia networks and improve their competitiveness by reducing capex and opex. It also provides excellent user experience through service convergence and multiaccess technologies. This helps operators transform into full-service, multimedia providers and fulfill their goals of sustainable development and profitability.

IMS On Cloud

ZTE rolled out its IMS-on-cloud solution in 2012. The solution provides large-capacity hosting for multinational operators. It can deploy logically independent IMS instances on the unified cloud platform and supports multitenancy deployment. Telco cloud makes centralized deployment, unified management, and remote geographical redundancy possible for multinational operators. This greatly reduces network construction cost and speeds up service deployment. Logically, each branch of the operator corresponds to an independent IMS core. This allows each branch to deploy personalized services and have an independent operation and settlement. Hosting has become a preferred choice for IMS deployment.

Conclusion

The development of carrier-class ATCA architecture, virtualization, and distributed processing technologies has made it possible to design a telco cloud that transforms existing telecom networks into terminal-pipe-cloud networks. Telco cloud facilitates network evolution to converged fixed/mobile networks based on IP. It also facilitates the development of multimedia, streaming media, and converged communication services as well as converged IT/CT applications. This helps operators build an operable, profitable, and evolvable full-service.