Arm said it has developed a universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE) proof of concept with NXP Semiconductors, Telco Systems and Vodafone aimed at supporting enterprise services such as SD-WAN, routing and firewall. The tests took place at Vodafone Group labs in the UK, and testers said this was the first time the group showed a fully orchestrated mix of container and virtual machine-based network functions running on the same platform.
The team was able to deploy and manage VNF and CNF applications running on an efficient 4-core Arm Cortex-A72 processor with a typical power consumption of 35W. They also delivered 15 Gbps throughput of IMIX (internet mix) traffic, using an 8-core Arm processor, by offloading OVS (OpenvSwitch) to hardware acceleration blocks, demonstrating the system’s ability to handle demand traffic requirements. The testers concluded that the system marries high performance with a low carbon footprint. NXP Layerscape processors were used, including hardware acceleration blocks, substantially reducing energy consumption and emissions.
During the proof of concept, several applications were launched and tested on a hybrid virtualization and container platform from Telco Systems NFVTime. These systems were tested on multiple Arm Neoverse-based processors, designed by NXP, demonstrating the ability to support real use cases with ever changing demands. The tests considered both SME and enterprise use-cases.
Gavin Young, Vodafone’s head of Fixed Access Center of Excellence, said the project was a major milestone toward a new way of deploying digital services. Vodafone noted that the idea behind an uCPE is to have equipment that can be provisioned or reprogrammed. When used topgether with network functions virtualization (NFV), uCPE reduces the number of devices needed to provision network services on a customer's footprint, reducing costs and increasing customer ability to upgrade (or reduce) services without replacing hardware.
