Tokyo – Japan’s leading mobile phone operator NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced Tuesday that it has succeeded in testing a new technology that facilitates connectivity to its service even when communications traffic is heavy.

NTT DOCOMO has completed proof-of-concept (PoC) trials that have verified the feasibility of network functions virtualization (NFV) using the software and equipment of six world-leading information communication technology (ICT) vendors — Alcatel- Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, and Nokia Networks, said the company in a release posted on its website on Tuesday.

The PoC trials will help to leverage technologies for next- generation virtualized mobile networks. Using the virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC), the trials successfully verified the interoperability of each vendor’s EPC software with a different vendor’s equipment, such as scalable data processing capability for congested data traffic and immediate network recovery in the event of hardware failure, the company said.

The verified technologies will enable communication software designed originally for dedicated hardware to run on multipurpose hardware. In the future, such technologies will allow mobile operators to combine network hardware and software components of any vendor for deployment of network systems.

Network virtualization is expected to offer key advantages, such as operational sustainability with improved connectivity for dense data traffic and during natural disasters, as well as in the event of hardware failure. It will also accelerate delivery of new services and drive more efficient infrastructure investment.

Serving over 63 million mobile customers in Japan, NTT DOCOMO aims to utilize a virtualized mobile network for the commercial deployment of services by the fiscal year ending March 2016, it said. Source: Xinhua