Alcatel-Lucent and Telefónica are to explore how virtualisation fits into the Internet of Things, as part of an expansion of their existing partnership testing NFV technology.
The operator is planning to test A-L’s virtualised service router (VSR) in a production environment, as well as the vendor’s virtualised evolved packet-core, session border controller and VCPE.
Both companies had been testing the VSR in Telefónica’s NFV Reference Lab with a 100 percent line-rate performance, meaning data was transported with zero losses.
At Mobile World Congress in March, Telefónica held a four-way video-conference call through Voice over LTE using an A-L virtual mobile network, which involved vRAN, vCDN, vEPC and vIMS.
A-L was one of several vendors which partnered with Telefónica last year on its Unica virtualisation project. The project aims to virtualise 30 percent of new infrastructure by 2016.
The French vendor said at the time it would apply its CloudBand platform to advance NFV implementation.
[Read more: Alcatel-Lucent launches carrier SDN platform]
Telefónica is one of the major advocates of virtualisation technology, arguing it will simplify networks, speed up innovation and allow operators to provide new types of products much quicker.
Enrique Blanco Global CTO, Telefónica, said: “We are pleased to continue our work with Alcatel-Lucent on the use of NFV technologies to transform future networks. We have already seen an outstanding performance in the testing of Alcatel-Lucent’s VSR, showing that it delivers comparable performance to hardware-based routers.
“Use of these technologies will open up new opportunities as we continue innovating to exceed our customer’s expectations.”