China Unicom has selected Cavium to accelerate the design and development of Virtualized BBU (base band unit from the base station) based on general purpose hardware and open source technologies.
Cavium is a fabless semiconductor company based in San Jose, California specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based network, video and security processors and SoC.
The collaboration will focus on commercializing vBBU systems using general purpose hardware based on Cavium’s ThunderX workload optimized data server processors which are built on ARM architecture. In addition, Cavium has joined the China Unicom CORD Industry Alliance and will drive adoption of open source architecture and technologies in China together with China Unicom.
China Unicom and Cavium will work together on new innovative fronthaul solutions, system architecture and vBBU performance and deployment.
According to Cavium, the collaboration allows it to align with China Unicom’s commercial networks technology development and innovation and research feasibility of Next Generation Virtualized Wireless Access Network. It will also enable Cavium to perform lab and field testing, evaluate results, drive deployment of developed technologies into commercial network, carry out lab and field performance test and assessment, accelerate pilot and application of new technical innovations in real-world networks.
Raj Singh General Manager of the Wireless Broadband Group at Cavium
The use of advanced general purpose hardware such as Cavium’s ThunderX workload optimized data severs allows us to provide a highly scalable virtualized solution for these requirements.
Dr. Tang Xiongyan, CTO of Network Technology Research Institute, China Unicom
Virtualized network based represents the overall direction for future network changes. China Unicom partners with Cavium, a leader in virtualized BBU technology field, to drive R&D of virtualization products based on general purpose processors, thus laying a solid foundation for building new generation of network infrastructure.
