Mavenir Systems is using white box routing to help wireless operators resolve some of the capacity constraints and latency issues in their networks.
Mavenir says that its new virtualized Media Breakout Controller (vMBC) will more efficiently route traffic from the network edge and break out local traffic so that it isn’t all sent through the core. The vMBC can be deployed anywhere at the network edge including cell sites, local data centers, and even at enterprises. And the vMBC is the same size as the existing cell site routers that it replaces, which will help ease the transition.
Analyst Iain Gillott with iGR Research said that Mavenir’s vMBC will help carriers reduce backhaul transport costs because they will be able to more efficiently route local traffic over their network instead of transporting it all back to the core. “The carrier is paying backhaul costs for that traffic today,” Gillott said. “This lets you break it out locally. It lowers the latency and improves the response for the consumer.”
Gillott estimates that about 80 percent of traffic over mobile networks is video, and 40 percent of that video traffic can cached at the edge.
However, Gillott adds that it’s difficult to say exactly how much this will save operators because video traffic is growing so dramatically. But it may help them delay their investment in backhaul because it provides them with more options.
What about MEC?
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is also championed as a way for operators to resolve capacity constraints and lower latency by processing traffic at the edge rather than driving it all to the cloud or the core. But Mavenir said that MEC still relies on conventional centralized architectures and is controlled at the core.
By contrast, the company’s vMBC uses software virtualization and off-the-shelf hardware to create that type of functionality at any location.
Brocade Assets
Mavenir’s vMBC is based upon the virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) technology that the company acquired from Brocade last year. In an interview with SDxCentral last November, Pardeep Kohli, CEO of Mavenir, said that Brocade’s vEPC assets were appealing because unlike some of the other vEPCs on the market, Brocade’s product line could be used at the network edge because it requires less than 10 percent of the processing power typically needed. “We believe we can address the whole low latency at the edge market,” Kohli said.
