Both companies have signed a MOU to develop and deploy a centralized 5G network.
The network slicing technology will play a key part in the process of satisfying the user´s needs towards 5G
The collaboration benefits from the capacities of the regional Ericcson Cloud laboratory, as well as the Ericsson HDS 8000 Lab.
Ericsson and South Korea´s SK Telecom have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate in the creation of a centralized 5G using network slicing technology. Its development, aided by Ericsson´s regional and HDS 8000 laboratories, is expected to be complete by the end of 2015.
According to this agreement, Ericsson and SK Telecom will develop and deploy their optimized network slicing technology for 5G services. Both companies will also continue to collaborate to establish a 5G test storage facility, as they have been doing so far.
Projected 5G use cases such as remote machinery, intelligent transportation and virtual reality will place new performance and security demands on networks. To meet these requirements, 5G networks will be built with network slicing technologies that use logical instead of physical resources, and which enable operators to provide networks on an as-a-service basis. The instantiation of the network slicing will use the Ericsson Virtual Evolved Packet Core solution.
The collaboration will leverage the capabilities of Ericsson's Regional Cloud Lab, which is distributed across four sites in North East Asia including Anyang in South Korea, Beijing and Shanghai in China, and Tokyo in Japan. Fully operational since 2014, the Lab supports operators with the development and verification of cloud, Network Functions Virtualization and software-defined networking technologies.
The network infrastructure will be designed and built on Ericsson's pioneering Hyperscale Datacenter System, Ericsson HDS 8000. Launched at Mobile World Congress in February 2015, this solution represents a new generation of hyperscale datacenter systems that uses Intel® Rack Scale Architecture for a disaggregated hardware approach that dramatically improves efficiency, utilization, automation and total cost of ownership for virtualized environments.
"Network slicing, based on virtual evolved packet core, is an important part of the technology evolution of 5G, supporting operators with a new, broader set of services. It is important that we work together in the industry on this journey", stated Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO, Ericsson.
