ASTRI collaborates with Wind River to support Small Cell and Security Gateway VNF in NFV Environments

(27 February 2015, Hong Kong)  Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) has been successful in running its LTE Small Cell Gateway and Security Gateway as Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) on Wind River® Titanium Server. A joint demonstration will be held at the forthcoming Mobile World Congress 2015.

Through its membership in the Wind River® Titanium Cloud ecosystem program, ASTRI is now able to provide its Small Cell Gateway Solution to run as a VNF on Wind River® Titanium Server. ASTRI worked closely with Wind River experts to pre-validate their LTE Small Cell Gateway Solution functionality and performance with the Titanium Server Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure platform. Through the Wind River® Titanium Cloud program, Wind River works with partners on optimized, interoperable solutions that accelerate time-to-market for service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers (TEM) deploying NFV infrastructure.

ASTRI’s LTE Small Cell Gateway Solution comprises a high performance IPSec Security Gateway and Small Cell Gateway. Enabled by ASTRI’s Fastgate Networking Stack and Wind River® Titanium Server, the IPSec Security Gateway can deliver over 20Gbps IPSec throughput in a virtualized environment. With the VNF support, the solution can be deployed flexibly on a single compute node or distributed onto multiple compute nodes.

“By working through the Titanium Cloud program, ASTRI was able to get to the market faster with a cloud based 4G network gateway running on a Carrier Grade platform,” said Dr Justin Chuang, Vice President and Group Director, Communications Technologies at ASTRI, “Since network virtualization is an important element in the next generation networks, ASTRI has made the first and important step forward on our network virtualization roadmap by validating functionality and performance on NFV infrastructure.”

“We are excited to see ASTRI introduce VNF that are supported by our NFV infrastructure platform, Titanium Server,” said Charlie Ashton, Senior Director, Business Development for Networking Solutions, Wind River, “Titanium Server includes critical and powerful elements to enable an NFV infrastructure, and by leveraging other pre-validated NFV elements such as the VNF from ASTRI, service providers can easily and quickly achieve their goals such as reducing costs while introducing new high value services.”

Wind River® Titanium Server is a carrier grade NFV infrastructure software solution that is designed to meet the stringent “always on” requirements of the telecom industry. With Titanium Server as the NFV infrastructure software foundation, the telecom industry can take full advantage of rapid service deployment along with the carrier grade uptime and strict reliability mandated by telecom networks. Titanium Server is based on technologies using open standards including carrier grade Wind River® Linux, real-time Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), carrier grade enhancements to OpenStack®, Intel® data Plane Development Kit (Intel DPDK) and accelerated vSwitch technologies, and it is optimized for Intel® architecture.

ASTRI and Wind River will carry out joint demonstration at Hall 3, Stand 3A10 at Mobile World Congress which will take place at Fira Gran Via exhibition centre in Barcelona, Spain from 2 to 5 March 2015. Mobile World Congress is the largest annual event for the mobile industry featuring cutting-edge technologies and prominent executives in an exhibition and conference. The show has been a major industry focus drawing an attendance between 70,000-80,000 people every year.

ASTRI commenced its LTE research and development in 2008 and has become a leader in LTE and LTE-Advanced small cell and terminal technologies, providing the first market-ready reference design for small cell and terminal baseband cores supporting both TD-LTE and LTE FDD. ASTRI’s LTE technologies have been employed in partners’ chips and system solutions serving public and private network markets. ASTRI core network technology was also successfully transferred to multiple companies.