ZTE announced the completion of live network verification of the industry’s first OLT built-in multi-access edge computing (MEC), in partnership with China Unicom and Zhongtong Bus.
Engineers at Liaocheng (Shandong) branch of China Unicom deployed the MEC downward to the OLT in the Internet of vehicles (IoV ) remote driving scenario for the verification.

The verification results show the real-time video backhaul latency during driving. They achieved 92 percent reduction in delay of the communication between the vehicle control electrical system and the control center with the latency reaching the millisecond level.

ZTE and China Unicom deployed a 5G network in standalone  mode at Zhongtong Bus plant to achieve 5G coverage for main roads in the plant, and connected ZTE’s 10G-PON OLT cards in China Unicom’s equipment room to the ONT in the plant control center to deliver high-bandwidth and low-latency wired network access.

Engineers have plugged the OLT with built-in blade cards to deploy the 5G user plane function (UPF), which enables rapid forwarding of service data flows via the local UPF, and provides end-to-end millisecond latency guarantee to remote-controlled vehicles and the control center of Zhongtong Bus.

The verification introduced the IT capability into the access office (AO) through the OLT built-in MEC function, which satisfies the requirements of experience-sensitive services. It is also a typical application scenario of ZTE’s Light Cloud solution. The results indicate that ZTE’s Light Cloud solution is well poised for the commercial deployment of MEC.

“In this verification, the MEC was deployed on the OLT in the AO to achieve flexible local forwarding of service data flows, minimize the service path latency, and offer a new solution to the application of smart transportation services,” Wang Xinbin, deputy general manager of the Liaocheng (Shandong) Branch of China Unicom, said.