China Telecom conducts three-tier decoupling test with Spirent

Spirent NFV and SDNChina Telecom Beijing Research Institute has completed the world’s first virtual broadband remote access server (vBRAS) three-tier decoupling test with the assistance of Spirent Communications for NFV deployments.

Spirent Communications said the three-tier project decoupled VNF elements, the virtualization layer and the hardware layer, marking a significant breakthrough in China Telecom’s CTNet2025 Network Restructuring.

Decoupling of VNF elements is the key to NFV deployments on large-scale. With decoupling of the three tiers, telecom operators can create network function virtualization and eliminate soft silos to accelerate the development of a new industrial eco-system.

At present, three-tier decoupling faces challenges, including how to orchestrate components of different levels from different vendors, how to test across different virtualization platforms, and how to introduce new testing methodologies for three-tier decoupling.

Spirent said the capability to test across platforms allows for accurate infrastructure capacity planning and deployment of future services.

Spirent provided test solutions including iTest automated test case execution engine; TestCenter performance testing emulation; and CloudStress, a synthetic workload generator for the test. Spirent integrated all these solutions with the TeleTOS framework, an automated test orchestration system, developed in-house by China Telecom.

“NFV faces challenges in deploying applications at scale in the existing networks, and the three-tier decoupling is one of the greatest challenges. Before the vBRAS three-tier decoupling, only hardware and software decoupling or two-tier decoupling was possible,” says Zhu Xuetian, director, Network Technology Research Department of the China Telecom Beijing Research Institute.

China Telecom developed the TeleTOS automated test orchestration system in-house and integrated it with Spirent’s test solutions greatly reducing the time needed for testing and accelerating time to value.

“Spirent has made many contributions in NFV testing methodologies, allowing China Telecom to ensure its high Quality of Service in virtualized operating networks, to turn-up and operate new services in an accelerated and effective way,” said Tan Hao, VP of Sales in Greater China and East Asia at Spirent.