Virtual CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) is one of the fastest growing NFV applications. Through the virtualization of CPE appliance, managed service providers can save the time and cost from the complexity of handling multiple dedicated hardware-based equipment connected at the customer/branch site to provide the needed services, which often results in frequent truck roll service costs and troubleshooting remains headache. With vCPE, managed service providers can optimally assist their clients, especially SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and branch offices, in cost efficiencies and service agility by leveraging VNF (virtualized network functions), such as routing and firewall, onto a multi-service gateway device. Managed services have thus become dynamic when network functions are software-defined, allowing more simplified and agile management.

Centralized Mode

In the centralized implementation, vCPE is used as a VNF (virtualized network functions) and is implemented on a carrier-grade computing hardware appliance in service provider data centers. The carrier appliance will run as router, firewall, VPN and all other network related services. For instance, in the diagram above, VNF is implemented within

Distributed Mode

On the other hand, there are carriers who prefer their applications in the distributed manner. In the distributed approach, vCPEs are deployed based on customers’ premises. For certain communication service functions, the NFV infrastructure is better as distributed geographically and hierarchically in order to optimize resources and efficiency. For instance, in telecom and broadcasting fields, the traffic today is occupied not only by voice and photos, but also video and audio contents that come in much larger file size. This will further limit the bandwidth in a centralized NFV. Therefore, a distributed, multi-hierarchy NFV where many vCPEs are distributed geographically based on customer premises, could benefit certain industries by offering network offloading during the streaming, more-distributed authentication and traffic routing to a closer peer point to reduce latency.

Hybrid Mode

Some operators may mix both centralized and distributed infrastructures for their specific applications. In that case, provisioning and management of vCPEs and VNFs are critical as most of the virtual CPEs are based on open source software, such as Open Stack or Open Switch.

Featured Products


HTCA-6200

High Availability Chassis 2U Telecom Network Appliance with 2 x86 CPU Blades and 2 I/O Blades

CPU Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3/v4 Series
Chipset Intel C612 Chipset

Read more
 

NCA-4010

x86 Rackmount Network Appliance with Intel Xeon® D-1500 Processor (Codenamed Broadwell-DE)

CPU Onboard Intel Xeon D-1548 or D-1518 Processor (Broadwell-DE)
Chipset SoC

Read more
 

FW-7525

Fanless Desktop x86 Network Platform for vCPE, SD-WAN and Network Edge

CPU Intel® Atom™ processor C2358(dual-core), C2518(quad-core) or C2558(quad-core)
Chipset None

Read more