CHINA MOBILE, TELEFONICA and ALCATEL-LUCENT SHOW vBBU with vCDN supporting live video
Here are pictures from a demo on the Alu, Telefonica and China Mobile booths supported live three-way video conversations. The test connected Remote Radio Heads on the China Mobile and Telefonica stands with a virtualised BBU and vEPC from Alcatel-Lucent. A vCDN node, providing an edge caching capability, also ran on the same standard Intel XEON-based HP server virtualisation platform as the vBBU and vEPC, for which Wind River provided its Titanium Server OS.
Telefonica provided live vIMS and vHSS control from its lab in Grenoble, France.
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Test devices and management and monitoring platform on the China Mobile stand.
Telefonica’s booth outlined the goals of the demo. 
It also showed the structural outline of the trial. 
And showed where the elements were located – including session control from its vIMS in Grenoble.
On the Alcatel-Lucent booth, there was another visualisation of the architecture of the trial 
WiFi Boost: using WiFi and cellular connectivity simultaneously
Alcatel-Lucent and Qualcomm showing “WiFi Boost” – its work for its cellularfor uplink/WiFi for downlink technology. Read more about this here (“Alcatel-Lucent marks new territory with WiFi Boost“). Note – this is not LAA/LTE-U.
“5G” from SK Telecom’s robot control.
As you probably know by now, SK Telecom was showing a robot that was controlled by the movements of a demonstrator wearing a whole bunch of sensors.
SK Telecom was also showing 7.55Gbps transmission speeds through 3D Beamforming technology that will enables the use of mmWave frequency bands. And here’s a “5G base station” – the radio supporting the 3D beamforming at 3.5GHz.
Full Duplex Wireless from Kumu and Intel
This year Kumu was back, showing a demo of live traffic across its full duplex wireless link. As well as showing live traffic, the demo this year was on more advanced pre-commercial kit. The whole of it is about to be packaged up and go on a tour of T1 carriers’ labs, Kumu told us. The company was embedded on Telefconica’s booth. 
Kumu’s was not the only full duplex demo. Intel also had some RF cancellation technology – the bit that makes full duplex work by allowing the radios to transmit and receive in the same channel. Unlike Kumu, the demo was not showing live traffic. 
NTT DoCoMo’s evolved core
Here’s NTT DoCoMo showing us where they think the core network is evolving. A demo from the operator addressed a known problem – and showed a concept of being able to abstract state info from an application node – so that when an operator scales in or scales out state data remains available. The issue is that traditional virtualisation scaling technology doesn’t work for any telco stateful node – when the node goes up or down in a virtual environment the state data goes with it. By removing the state data from the node and placing it in a remote database, separating state data from call processing, it can always be available, even when the operator scales a node in and out, migrates or switches an application.
OpenCloud’s open virtual VoLTE
OpenCloud was demonstrating the ability to put up services on its: just as an illustrative demo it showed core MMTel functions, such as call blocking, forward, and enhanced services such as parental controls, using its TAS (Telephony Application Server), Metaswitch’s Perimita and Clearwater IMS elements, and Dialogic MRF.
Ericsson’s “first 5G phone”
Ericsson had a mobile doing 4×4 MIMO at the 15GHz band – generating over 5Gbps throughput. The mobile is on the truck, the antenna is the white rectangle in the background up above it. The mobile was communicating with another test mobile, based in Ericsson’s lab in Kista, Stockholm. “If it was small,” said one 5G expert, “then it would be worrying as we are a long way from commercialisation”. The first 4G test bed devices were bigger than this, by the way.
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