Sophia Antipolis, 24 April 2024

The ETSI NFV community met for its NFV#45 Plenary Meeting in March 2024, from the 11th to the 18th, in Paris, France. This meeting was hosted by Orange SA at its innovation center, Orange Gardens, in Chatillon, which is located in a suburb of Paris. The ETSI NFV community visited the same venue during the NFV#27 Plenary Meeting in September 2019.

Figure 1: Orange Gardens, Paris

The meeting was accompanied by an ETSI NFV Telco Cloud-native Executive Roundtable held on March 18th, with the objective to engage executive leadership members and technical experts from major European operators, telco vendors and open source projects to share the experience of building the Telco cloud, and discuss the future of Telco cloud and the relationship with the NFV standards. More information can be found here.

The meeting was collocated with the 27th Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks (ICIN) organized from 11th to 14th March 2024. ISG NFV representatives co-organized the “Workshop on Intent Driven Autonomous Networks (NESTOR)”, where a keynote speech regarding the NFV specification work on NFV Automation was also provided. In addition, Tutorial #3: “Green NFV: framework and enablers for energy savings in telecom network deployments” was organized by NFV representatives. One of the ISG NFV vice chairs, Deng Hui participated in the closing panel discussion on “Intelligent network service management across the compute continuum”. Sharing the same venue allowed delegates from both events to provide various informal exchanges during breaks. Detailed information about the conference can be found here.

An additional activity this week was an ETSI ISG NFV – Sylva Project workshop held on March 13th. This workshop was about initiating possible cooperation between ETSI ISG NFV and the Linux Foundation Sylva Project. The main objective was to reach possible harmonization between ETSI NFV standards and the Sylva Project approach to cloudified infrastructure management and enable interoperability for Telco cloud solutions. The exchange of information and scope of work was very effective and both organizations concluded to continue collaboration to reach practical results in the near future.

The NFV#45 Plenary meeting continued discussions for future directions related to the ISG NFV evolution. Note that as a result of previous discussions, ISG NFV had implemented in the beginning of 2024 internal working groups restructuring by merging the Reliability WG (REL) into the Interfaces and Architecture WG (IFA), as well as the Testing WG (TST) into the Solutions WG (SOL). Decisions taken during the NFV#45 Plenary meeting consider the creation of a marketing-oriented WG with the objective of promoting NFV visibility and triggering cooperation with other SDOs, open source projects and the telecom industry. The meeting agreed to work on two new white papers. The first white paper will discuss the added value of NFV-MANO, and the other one will discuss new architecture supporting NFV evolution. The development of joint white papers with other organizations was also proposed. There is also an intention to revive the PlugTest events under the ETSI NFV umbrella.

During NFV#45 week, the usual technical work undertaken by respective WGs has progressed. It is worth highlighting the completion of Release 4 specifications version 4.6.1, which concludes the work on Release 4. This set is accompanied by ETSI GR NFV 007 Release 4 Description Report and ETSI GS NFV 006 Architectural Framework Specification.

Good progress was achieved in Release 5 normative work of technical features, including FEAT21 on NFV support for 5G, which further progressed the development of the PaaS Services framework, FEAT24 on VNF Generic OAM with integrating of OAM and PaaS Services in the second version of ETSI GS NFV-IFA 049, FEAT29 on Green NFV by implementing recommendations from ETSI GR NFV-EVE 021 into Release 5 relevant specifications, as well as FEAT30 on VNF configuration by completing recommendations from ETSI GR NFV-EVE 022 into relevant Release 5 specifications. FEAT19a on container networking enhancements was completed by finalizing the ETSI GR NFV-IFA 043 report, which was sent for approval by correspondence. ETSI GS NFV-IFA 053 specification on physical infrastructure management was progressed as well.

OpenStack Tacker community was again well represented by various delegates attending the meeting on-site. They provided technical feedback to ETSI NFV related to constraints on the order of LCM notifications and LCM operation.

Release 6 work was progressed for architectural support for NFV evolution (ETSI GS NFV‑IFA 054) and informative reports on new infrastructure resources for NFV (ETSI GR NFV-EVE 023) and on latency aspects and new communication technologies for NFV (ETSI GR NFV-EVE 024).

New work items adopted by the meeting include a report on serverless and other application virtualization forms in NFV (ETSI GR NFV-EVE 025), as well as stage 3 specification of protocol and data model solutions for VNF Generic OAM functions and PaaS Services (ETSI GS NFV‑SOL 024). Also updating of API Conformance Testing Specification (ETSI GS NFV‑TST 010) was initiated.

A technical presentation from Ubique on “CNF Orchestration With Nephio On MicroK8s” was held at the end of the opening plenary. The presentation provided information about practical aspects related to the implementation experience of managing CNFs using Nephio and NFV‑MANO. Experience gained during this development can be beneficial for future harmonization works.

The ETSI NFV community looks forward to the next meeting in June (03-07 June), which will be hosted by ZTE in Xi’an, China.

Figure 2: Meeting participants at NFV#45