This September, the IFA and EVE working groups of the ETSI ISG NFV met face-to-face in Munich from 3rd to 5th September, 2024. The meeting was hosted by NTT DOCOMO in their premises in the west of Munich.

Edition ed521 of NFV specifications in Release 5 was continuously progressing NFV standards for 8 features on basis of the first edition of Release 5 (ed511), of which the most prominent ones are “Green NFV” (energy efficiency), “PIM” (physical infrastructure management) and VNF Generic OAM functions and other PaaS Services, which had major updates in edition 5.2.1.

Overall, the evolution of all features included updates in the basic NFV specifications, such as the functional requirements in IFA010 and the interface specifications of the well-known reference points and services.

The focus of this technical meeting was twofold, on one side the stage 2 IFA feature normative work for the second edition of Release 5 (ed521) was finalized, and on the other side, study items related to the future evolution for NFV in Release 6 were proceeded.

• Physical infrastructure management had been initially introduced and developed with the first edition ed511 of Release 5 and now in its second edition ed521. Detailed analysis was made on relevant industry solutions related to physical infrastructure management and the mapping between different PIM management services and capabilities of solutions.
• Energy efficiency support in NFV added definitions about the interworking with the physical infrastructure management and enhancements on state management and resource reservations, as well as the NFVO, VNFM and PIM functional enhancement to provide power consumption and energy metrics associated to the NS and VNF.
• The updates on VNF generic OAM functions and other PaaS Services work included additional clarifications and definitions about the interactions between PaaS services and various other elements in the NFV architecture like also simplification of the overall PaaS Services architecture .
• NFV support of virtualized RAN progressed by updating the analysis provided for aspects related to descriptors used for the infrastructure and operations for the cloud gateway systems to align with the latest updates in the specification work of O-RAN working groups.
• Feature development on NFV support for 5G and VNF configuration enhancements were brought to completion with this edition.
• Promoting the study on NFV evolution in Release 6 was continued. New use cases were added and a comparison of several new virtualization technologies was discussed. Background information was provided to the study on using Model-as-a-Service in NFV. Main discussions for release 6 were done on the evolution of the NFV architecture. Descriptions of new trends on energy efficiency, multi-tenancy and digital twin were added in the report, and initial ideas on creating a merged unified architectural solution based on the solutions input were exchanged in the meeting.

An NFV certificate awarding ceremony for Ulrich Kleber was warmly made at the beginning of afternoon session on Thursday 5^th of September, 2024. ETSI ISG NFV Chair, Yoshihiro Nakajima, who was remotely connected to the meeting, delivered a passionate speech for thanking Uli for his outstanding contribution to the ETSI ISG NFV through the years. All the ETSI NFV community thanked Ulrich Kleber and wished the best for his upcoming retirement life.

The next NFV meeting will be again a full meeting of all working groups and plenary in October; it will be hosted by Huawei in Paris, France.