11 April 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 announced that it has joined the Linux Foundation’s data plane development kit (DPDK) project. ZTE became a Gold member on the day that the DPDK community moved to the Linux Foundation.

DPDK consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of central processing unit (CPU) architectures. In a world where the network is becoming fundamental to the way people communicate, performance, throughput and latency are increasingly important for applications like wireless core and access, wireline infrastructure, routers, load balancers, firewalls, video streaming, Voice over IP (VoIP) and more. By enabling very fast packet processing, DPDK is making it possible for the telecommunications industry to move performance-sensitive applications like the backbone for mobile networks and voice to the cloud. It was also identified as a key enabling technology for network functions virtualization (NFV) in the original European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV White Paper.

DPDK was created in 2010 by Intel. The open source community was established at DPDK.org in 2013 and has facilitated the continued expansion of the project. Since then, the community has been continuously growing in terms of the number of contributors, patches and contributing organisations, with 10 major releases completed including contributions from over 400 individuals from 70 different organisations.

The DPDK project includes members from the telecommunication industry, network and cloud infrastructure vendors, as well as multiple hardware vendors. The DPDK project includes 9 Gold members, including ZTE Corporation, 5 Silver members and 4 Associate members.

“DPDK is a key technology that enables the communications industry to move to a virtualised infrastructure. As a global leader in telecommunications and information technology, we see strong open source community support as an essential element to building high performance networking solutions for the cloud infrastructure,” said Zhang Wanchun, Vice President of ZTE and Principal of ZTE’s Wireless Product R＆D Institute. “We will consistently support the development of the DPDK project and collaborate with industry peers to help build and shape this technology for the future.”