China Unicom Opens New Milestone in Network Advancement — Joint CUNOS Evaluation Completed with Purple Mountain Laboratories
Leveraging its expertise in vertical industry customization and driven by the need for innovation in its own network services, China Unicom is actively exploring new directions in open networking technologies. Against the backdrop of 5G infrastructure expansion, the company has deepened its commitment to opening up white-box networking capabilities and ensuring autonomy and controllability in core technologies. It independently developed CUNOS, a white-box router operating system, which was awarded the Future Network Leading Innovation Achievement Prize by the China Institute of Communications in 2021.
In 2021 year, 9 month, China Unicom's Research Institute, in collaboration with UTStarcom and Purple Mountain Laboratories, completed a joint evaluation of the CUNOS operating system within an open network test environment. The results confirmed that CUNOS is stable and ready to support 5G network services, including basic operations, service assurance, time synchronization, and security. During the evaluation, CUNOS was deployed on hardware platforms from both UTStarcom and Chuling as well as commercial chips; all integration tests were successfully completed, with key features and performance metrics meeting expectations. Currently, leveraging white-box device platforms, China Unicom's Research Institute is partnering with SiFotonics to advance the 100G Lambda Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) standard for extended-reach single-channel 100G optical modules. Together, they have validated the single-channel 100G ER1 solution, achieving normal 100GE service performance and supporting fiber transmission distances up to 40km.
CUNOS serves as China Unicom's next-generation experimental platform for innovation in transport network technology. Built on an open-source foundation at the system level, it ensures high portability. Its internal architecture employs a highly cohesive, loosely coupled modular design, balancing scalability with high reliability. Additionally, CUNOS innovatively extends ONLP interfaces to invoke white-box chassis hardware platforms and integrates switch chip abstraction layer extensions tailored for 5G transport scenarios, enabling compatibility with switch chips from different vendors. In collaboration with domestic switch chip manufacturer Centec Networks, China Unicom Research Institute is actively building a white-box hardware ecosystem and driving standardization of 5G transport network chip capabilities to ensure autonomy and controllability of core components in white-box routers.
Leveraging its expertise in vertical industry customization and driven by the need for innovation in its own network services, China Unicom is actively exploring new directions in open networking technologies. Against the backdrop of 5G infrastructure expansion, the company has deepened its commitment to opening up white-box networking capabilities and ensuring autonomy and controllability in core technologies. It independently developed CUNOS, a white-box router operating system, which was awarded the Future Network Leading Innovation Achievement Prize by the China Institute of Communications in 2021.
This article is reprinted from C114 Communications Network.
