Feb. 27, 2018, Barcelona—At the 2018 Barcelona Mobile World Congress, China Unicom, in collaboration with ZTE and Intel, held a press conference, to announce the official launch of their large-scale edge cloud field trials, and release the China Unicom Edge Service Platform Architecture and Industry Ecosystem White Book, as well as demonstrate Edge vCDN and Edge Intelligence analysis services in Intel’s Booth.

Along with digital applications booming, the deep integration among 5G network, cloud computing, big data, VR and AI, is becoming the key basic infrastructure of digital transformation in multiple industries. Each large and global telecom operators are working on network re-architect and transformation. Edge-Cloud can meet the service experience requirements of lower latency, higher bandwidth and localization, and improve network use efficiency, also can force new business models. With the opportunity provided by mixed-ownership reform and increased capacity, China Unicom will build unified edge DC cloudification resource pool quickly to open strategic cooperation with OTT partners.

In a press conference in Barcelona, China Unicom announced the official launch of edge cloud field trials and pre-commercial deployment in 15 provinces and cities, including campus, stadiums, parks, IIoT and IoV and other scenarios. To lead the industry, China Unicom has collaborated with ZTE, Intel, Tencent Video, StarShine, Opzoon and other partners, to build an edge-cloud testbed in Tianjin Jingjin university town. So far based on this testbed, the building and validating of edge vCDN, edge transcoding and edge intelligence analysis services are in progress and demonstrated at MWC 2018. The edge-cloud service platform is built based on servers using Intel’s latest Xeon® Scalable Processor Family, and optimized for the open source Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)，Intel® SR-IOV and other platform technologies. Using edge vCDN can reduce bandwidth strain, delay (contrast with traditional CDN, average RTT time delay decreases 50%, and HTTP download rate improves 43% ) and loss in network transmission and multilevel forwarding, while helping content providers to lower costs and optimize user experience.

Zhu Changbo, vice president of China Unicom Network Technology Research Institute introduced the overall Edge-Cloud architecture, evolution roadmap and key use cases. Facing the 5G integration requirements of fixed and mobile networks, China Unicom is devoted to building edge Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions through open source and standards. This requires flexible allocation and configuration of compute, network and storage resources to realize diversified edge service management and orchestration.  The architecture also provides rich platform service capabilities and unified APIs available to the ecosystem to accelerate business incubation of edge applications.

Shao Guanglu, executive vice president of China Unicom said: “With the increased need for edge services today, operators in the 5G era, we will have more opportunities to expand value-added business, supporting the transformation to end-to-end integrated services. One of the key points of China Unicom’s network transformation is to bring high bandwidth, low latency and enhanced mobile broadband down to the network edge. Now, China Unicom has built deep cooperation in edge-cloud area with industrial leading partners, including Ali, Baidu, Intel , Tencent, and ZTE.  We have commenced planning and construction work on thousands of edge datacenters. In future edge-cloud trials, China Unicom hopes to cooperate with more industry partners, focusing on HD video, VR/AR, Industrial IOT, Internet of Vehicles and other service scenarios, building out a 5G network edge ecosystem”

Zhao Xianming, president of ZTE Corporation, said: “ZTE is always dedicated to partnering with China Unicom and Intel to construct intelligent, highly efficient and open 5G-orientated wireless networks. In recent years, ZTE and China Unicom have worked together on network exposure capability, standardization evolution, end-to-end application verifications, etc. This whitepaper is definitely a phased achievement of trilateral cooperation among China Unicom, ZTE and Intel. In the future, ZTE will further deepen our innovation cooperation with operators and partners in the vertical industries to promote the reshaping of 5G-orientaed smart networks, and to make joint efforts to embrace the 5G era.

Caroline Chan, vice president and general manager of 5G Infrastructure Division, Network Platforms Group, Intel Corp., said “The 5G infrastructure collaboration between CUC, Intel and ZTE is accelerating large scale field trials of technologies such as multi-access edge computing. This is an important development that connects the cloud to the network edge. Intel is working closely with industry partners including CUC and ZTE on current deployments, while validating new usage models for the future.”