Huawei Helps China Unicom Release CUBE-Edge 2.0 and Industry Practice White Paper

[Barcelona, Spain, February 27, 2019] Huawei helped China Unicom release a white paper on the CUBE-Edge 2.0 intelligent edge service platform and its industry practice at MWC 2019. This white paper uses the 5G network evolution and MEC service requirements of China Unicom as a basis, and focuses on the overall MEC architecture and the CUBE-Edge 2.0 intelligent edge service platform, to demonstrate the achievements of cooperation between China Unicom and Huawei in vertical industries. It provides a solid reference for the telecom industry.

White paper release at MWC2019

The white paper shows that MEC helps deploy services to be localized and those require high bandwidth and low latency on the network edge. This facilitates the network reconstruction for 5G readiness and accelerates digital transformation. Huawei actively explores and applies edge computing, and provides the industry-leading MEC solution to help China Unicom build the CUBE-Edge 2.0 edge service platform to meet diversified service requirements of different industries. CUBE means a hexahedron, indicating the '6C' concept proposed for the CUBE-Edge 2.0 intelligent edge service platform.

• Close-to-user

After being deployed close to users, services are locally processed and feature a high bandwidth and low latency, improving user experience and reducing the impact of massive amounts of data traffic on the transport network.

• Cloudification

The MEC edge cloud uses an all-cloud architecture to build the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms for data storage, backup, and forwarding. SDN networking is used between edge clouds to implement network cloudification and remotely automate network deployments and management.

• Connection

Fixed–mobile convergence (FMC) is used to support 4G/5G/Wi-Fi and smooth evolution from 4G to 5G.

• Coordination

Cloud-edge synergy is used to provide industry customers with cloud-based data services through coordination between the edge cloud, the communication cloud, and the public cloud.

• Computing

Different types of hardware such as X86 and ARM CPUs, and various acceleration technologies such as iNIC, NP, FPGA, GPU, and AI chips are used to adapt to different vertical application scenarios.

• Capability

The edge cloud supports capability exposure and provides a unified external interface for third parties to develop and invoke services, including location, RNIS, charging, DNS, vCDN, and rendering services.

Wang Changling, Core Network Chief Architect of China Unicom, said: "In 2018, China Unicom launched the MEC edge cloud pilots in 15 provinces and cities in China, and has proactively promoted the standards of the MEC edge cloud. In the future, we look forward to working with more industry partners to deploy more MEC edge cloud pre-commercial pilots in 31 provinces in China, to jointly promote the commercial application in various edge service scenarios, and to provide a new channel enabling digital transformation towards 5G networks."

Shi Jilin, President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, said: "Huawei is an important partner for China Unicom in 5G network construction. Huawei has worked together with industry partners to build the MEC ecosystem and is dedicated to developing the MEC solution that features ultra-massive connections, ultra-high performance, ultra-ultimate experience, and ultra-high security, to help China Unicom achieve large deployments of MEC in smart manufacturing, smart ports, IoV, VR/AR, big video, intelligent security protection, and other fields."

To follow the concept of "WO Connects Everything, MEC Empowers Intelligence", China Unicom will continue working with Huawei to further carry out the strategy of "focus, innovation, and cooperation" to accelerate 5G commercial deployments and build a fully connected, intelligent world.