Telco clouds and Virtual Telco: Consolidation, convergence, and beyond

In this position paper we introduce Virtual Telco, a comprehensive effort to simplify the management of deployed telecommunication services by using a Cloud computing approach. The main objective of Virtual Telco is to replace the costly dedicated hardware implementing several centralized control plane functions and other services with distributed solutions that may be allocated on-demand over a pool of dependable, dynamically contracted computing and networking resources that are easy to manage. Virtual Telco relies on state-of-the-art techniques in the domains of virtualization and distributed systems to meet the challenging criteria of reliability, scalability, and timeliness required by present and future telecommunication standards and services. As a representative example of a Virtual Telco application, we propose the case of the distributed mobility management entity (MME) for next-generation LTE cellular networks.