In October golden autumn, ETSI ISG NFV#47 meeting was hosted by Huawei, in Versailles area in Paris, France, from October 7th to 11th, 2024. The meeting hotel was very close to NetworkX 2024 exhibition venue, which facilitated the participation of ETSI NFV delegates to both events. The slightly cold and often rainy weather did not prevent people’s enthusiasm from discussion and communication in technical topics. The community focused on promoting Release 6 NFV evolution activities, and exchanged ideas with experts joining the NetworkX event, on Telco cloud topics and the future of NFV.

In the morning opening session on Monday 7th, ETSI Technical Officer Antoine Mouquet firstly announced the recent community election results for the newly elected ISG NFV officers:

• ISG NFV chair: Yoshihiro Nakajima from NTT DOCOMO was re-elected;
• ISG NFV vice chair: Hui Deng from Huawei was re-elected;
• TSC Chair (a.k.a. Technical Manager): Brendan Hassett from Huawei was newly elected;
• EVE WG chair: Linze Wu from China Telecom was newly elected;
• IFA WG chair: Haitao Xia from Huawei was re-elected.

Subsequently, the ISG NFV Chair, Yoshihiro Nakajima, delivered a brief chairman opening speech, providing updates regarding ISG NFV’s request to extend by the next two-years lifetime (2025‑2026) which was approved by the ETSI Director General after consultation of the ETSI Board. He also called the community to rethink about the future NFV‑MANO architecture and the NFV evolution to accommodate new innovative use cases in telco cloud.

On Monday 7th afternoon, ETSI ISG NFV organized a special Telco Cloud and AI-native open session, with invited guests from global operators, vendors, open-source communities and analysts, discussing future standard directions for telco cloud and AI‑native technologies. For more information on this open session, see our blog post at: https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/blogs/entry/how-ai-and-open-source-are-shaping-the-future-of-telco-cloud.

ETSI NFV representatives, were also invited to attend NetworkX sessions. The ISG NFV Chair, Yoshihiro Nakajima, and one of the ISG vice Chairs, Hui Deng were involved in a panel discussion on Telco transformation from telco to tech-co on Tuesday 8th of November. The TSC Chair, Brendan Hassett, together with the NFV rapporteurs, Joan Triay and Xu Yang were invited to present the ETSI NFV approach in a joint ETSI and Sylva workshop on Thursday 10th with the subject “From Cloud native to AI‑native in Telecoms”. More information on the above events may refer to our blog post at: https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/blogs/entry/etsi-isg-nfv-lf-sylva-joint-workshop-at-networkx-2024.

The NFV technical discussion in the NFV#47 meeting covered topics from both NFV Release 5 and Release 6. Release 6 study items made good progress, with the outcome related to features development activities in EVE WG, and a first architectural solution related to the NFV evolution endorsed by the IFA WG. In more details:

• New NFVI (EVE023): Three potential solutions on management scopes and interactions between NFV-MANO and Public Cloud in infrastructure provisioning and network functions management were proposed.
• NFV support for deterministic networks (EVE024): Background info on IETF DetNet concepts and QoS management in NFV were introduced.
• New virtualization forms (EVE025): Background information on eBPF technology was introduced. Meanwhile, potential solutions and key issues to apply WASM in NFV framework were discussed.
• Computing and network convergence (EVE026): General overview on the concept of computing and network convergence was made, with open discussion on potential use cases and study areas. Coordination between ETSI and 3GPP in the future study is expected.
• Model as a Service (EVE027): The study was kicked off, with the delivery of an introduction as well as a discussion about the foreseen challenges of large model technology, and the relationship between Model-as-a-Service and AI applications deployment and utilization.
• New architecture to support NFV evolution (IFA054): A baseline solution about a high-level architectural framework related to the NFV-MANO evolution was intensively discussed. Consensus in the IFA working group was achieved for a new design, in which a Telco Cloud framework is comprised of Telco Cloud Infrastructure stratum, Telco Cloud Platform stratum and Telco Cloud Service Orchestration stratum. The Telco Cloud provides respective infrastructure services, platform services and orchestration services to the northbound consumers of Telco Cloud Applications or Other OSS/BSS.

For Release 5, a package of stage 2 group specifications (totally 21) was submitted for ISG approval, which accommodated deliverables related to the development of several features in the timeline of second drop of Release 5 (ed521). The features include container networking aspects, NFVI connectivity integration and operationality, NFV support for 5G, VNF generic OAM, NFV support for vRAN, Green NFV, VNF configuration, Physical Infrastructure Management (PIM) and certificate management (security topics). Stage 3 work focused on promoting the progress of the following features: Management Data Analytics in telco cloud, policy management models, VNF generic OAM and certificate management. A series of stage 3 group specifications reached their stable draft status in this meeting. A new stage 3 work item on data model of PIM services was also submitted for ISG approval.

Like in the previous meetings, a dedicated “NFV future” session before the closing plenary was held on Friday morning, 11th of October. Challenges as perceived by network operators were introduced, related to orchestration, network provisioning, service monitoring and operation and infrastructure management. 

Every meeting was always short-lived, however the next journey had already begun. Enjoy the life, expect the return of ETSI NFV for the NFV#48 meeting to ETSI headquarter in the week 9‑13 of December 2024.