During early winter season, friends from ETSI ISG NFV gathered again at the beautiful riverside of the Thames, to promote the progress of the current active work items and meanwhile, standing at the milestone of 10 years’ point of time, foresee the next decade’s evolution of NFV with Release 6 planning. This meeting hosted by Huawei, was co-located with Layer123 World Congress 2022, which was held in the same building, Queen Elizabeth II Centre from December 5th to 7th. It was a great pleasure to see many familiar old faces who had deeply contributed to ETSI ISG NFV standards.

It was still a very busy and fruitful F2F meeting week with about 50 people’s participation on site. Both the number of delegates and contributions increased steadily from the previous NFV#39 meeting. During the 3 months since NFV#39 meeting, 1 stage 2 ed441 New WID and 1 super WID including 12 stage 3 ed441 specifications were approved, 29 final drafts including stage 2 and stage 3 ed371 specifications were published, and 5 final drafts including NFV006ed441 on MANO Architectural Framework were in ISG approval via remote consensus process. Highlights of NFV#40 meeting include:

• 5 New WID proposals were approved by the ISG:
  • NWI proposal for CIS Cluster Management stage 3
  • NWI on NFV-SOL018ed441 (reopening specification for profiling the service interfaces offered by Container Infrastructure Service Management (CISM))
  • Maintenance of NFV terminology (NFV003)
  • NWI for transforming release description to a group report
  • NWI proposal on CCM-VIM Interoperability Interface and Information Model Specification
• Second round of feature proposal discussion on NFV Release 6
• Attend ETSI prospects workshop in Layer123 event
• Joint WG session to share information about Release 4 features tracking, OpenStack Tacker feedback and OAuth 2.0 scope

In the opening plenary, Yoshihiro Nakajima, Chair of ISG NFV brought good news from ETSI board that ISG NFV’s request for two years’ extension was approved by ETSI Board #140 meeting. He emphasized again the importance of communication among people in different cultures, and invited people to participate and enjoy experience sharing during the subsequent events of the week.

After the opening plenary, all NFV representatives were invited by ETSI to attend Layer123 ETSI prospects workshop jointly organized by ISG NFV, ZSM and MEC. Ulrich Kleber, Chair of ETSI NFV TSC, made a presentation on summarizing the latest progress of ISG NFV work items. Yoshihiro Nakajima, shared fresh insights of potential new NFV proposals in respect to architecture evolution, full automation and autonomous network, flexible deployment in distributed environment and cloud-native adaptation in telecom industry. Diego R. López, ISG NFV NOC chair, brought new thoughts on the challenges and opportunities of NFV future from the viewpoint of network operators, concluded in NFV NOC whitepaper to be published soon. Hui Deng, Vice chair of ISG NFV, finally guided the audience to recap the unforgettable history of ISG NFV and sent invitations to industry partners to join NFV 10th anniversary celebration at Sophia Antipolis in next March. Follow up the panel among leadership members from all three ISGs, Yoshihiro Nakajima and Cristina Badulescu (Vice chair of ISG NFV), attended the inter-ISG communications and shared views on improving the importance of standardization in the future ecosystem of telco industry.

An exciting session on shaping NFV future with Release 6 planning was held in the evening of Wednesday. Building on proposals which were collected since the previous face to face meeting in September, 19 proposals were collected or updated and organized into four groups. The first area of proposals is about improving or evolving the NFV-MANO APIs, and include declarative, data-driven and intent APIs, as well as the goal to come closer to open source implementations by re-using de-facto standard APIs. A second area covers general capabilities for the NFV-MANO, such as improved automation, more distributed deployments or proactive and predictive management. The third area extends the view of the NFVI (NFV Infrastructure) by supporting new technologies such as other forms of virtualization or deterministic communication technologies, and introducing new futuristic use cases, such as non-terrestrial-networks, high-altitude platform stations, unmanned aerial vehicles or also new types of resources. The last area tries to improve processes and structures of the ISG and drives for more synergy, agility and alignment with other industry organizations. This large set of proposals now needs to be sorted; some topics need to be addressed earlier than the Release 6, while others may be targeted to the future after Release 6. Topics that can be analyzed and specified in a Release 6 timeframe need to be described as new features or work items. Starting with those, the main goals for the new Release 6 can be defined.

Finally, in the closing plenary, Yoshihiro Nakajima announced the winners for ISG NFV Excellence Award 2022. Joerg Aelken from Ericsson, was awarded for his outstanding technical work done as feature prime and rapporteur of different GSs that are part of FEAT17, as well as his excellent leadership of IFA WG Vice-Chair as industry outreach and spokesperson; Maria Toeroe from Ericsson, was awarded for her outstanding technical contribution on NFV-MANO reliability, availability, and enhanced maintenance capability; Shitao Li from Huawei was awarded for his outstanding contribution and longstanding rapporteurship on SOL001, and Hui Deng from Huawei was awarded for his excellent leadership of ISG Vice-Chair as industry outreach and spokesperson at various industry conference and event planning.

Congratulations to all of the above delegates!

At the time of parting, people make a promise to reunion in next March, and welcome ISG NFV’s 10th birthday together.