Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking, announced a collaboration with Sprint Corporation, a national carrier in the United States, using Packet, a cloud service provider, public cloud based on Cavium ThunderX2 Arm-based servers and virtualized mobile core network orchestrated on Containers.

Sprint's testing has demonstrated promising total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages over conventional architecture. A live demonstration of this testing, including a complete end-to-end containerized mobile network with live traffic on commercial UE, will be shown at Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Spain, at both the Arm booth (Hall 6 Stand 6E30) and Cavium booth (Hall 2 Stand 2M61).

The containerized mobile core network (cEPC) runs at Packet, a commercially available public cloud, on Cavium ThunderX2 Arm-based servers. The radio access network is a 3GPP compliant split-RAN implementation with both the vBBU (virtualized baseband unit) and the remote radio unit running on Cavium silicon (ThunderX2 and OCTEON Fusion-M processors).

"We see a great opportunity driving better economics and TCO with increased power savings using Arm-based servers, thereby enabling further distribution to the edge," said Aaron Hinkle, Systems Architect, Technology, Innovation and Architecture, Sprint.

"Arm and our ecosystem of partners have been actively growing systems, especially targeting NFV and service provider network use cases," said Drew Henry, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Business Unit, Arm. "This is a significant step forward in completing end-to-end virtualized mobile network deployed on an Arm-based infrastructure which will enable the next trillion connected devices."

"We are very excited to collaborate with Sprint to test innovative NFV deployment scenarios and to showcase the promising TCO and power savings live demonstrations using our ThunderX2 Arm-based servers and 3GPP compliant virtualized RAN implementation," said Raj Singh, Vice President & General Manager of the Network & Communication Group, Cavium. "Cavium has been collaborating with many service providers on innovative NFV projects both directly and in open source communities utilizing our differentiated and highly scalable Arm-based processor and SoC families, rich software, and hardware eco-systems, and strong application domain expertise."