What happened at the NFV Evolution virtual event?
A virtual event on NFV Evolution organized by ETSI in partnership with Telecom TV and sponsored by Huawei was held from 19 to 21 April 2021. The objective of the event was for the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) to get feedback from the industry on implementation experience with the ISG’s specifications and on future topics to be addressed in next specification releases. The event was also an opportunity for the participants to get updated on ETSI NFV’s activities, deliverables and future plans, as well as on the progress made in open source communities with regards to the convergence with the ISG’s standards. The event was held in parallel with the 34th meeting of the ISG. The choice was not accidental as this was the meeting where the ISG launched the process for collecting proposals from its members and participants on the features to be addressed within the scope of its next specification release (NFV Release 5).
The event programme featured six original presentations selected from the responses received to an open call, addressing deployment experience, new use cases and technical requirements:
- Mr. Yuya Kuno, NTT DOCOMO, presented DOCOMO’s experience in developing and operating NFV and future expansion.
- Mr. Pierre Lynch, Keysight Technologies and Ms. Silvia Almagia, ETSI CTI Technical Expert jointly presented “Measuring NFV Evolution: ETSI NFV Plugtests”.
- Mr. Borja Nogales, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, presented “An NFV system to support service provisioning on UAV platforms: a walkthrough on implementation experience and standardization challenges”.
- Dr. Lingli Deng, China Mobile, presented “From Orchestration Towards Automation”
- Dr. Haopeng Zhu, Huawei Technologies Co., presented “Towards the future of NFV: Edge-native, Containerization, Networking-NFV convergence”.
- Mr. Gianpietro Lavado, Whitestack, presented about the advances in deployment of standardized NFV Orchestration through ETSI OSM.
Several of the presentations confirmed the industry objective of making networks increasingly autonomous and extending infrastructure resources to the edge and access. The programme also included three invited presentations from open source communities (Anuket, CNCF and ONAP) involved in the NFV landscape. These presentations as well as that related to ETSI OSM confirmed that collaboration with the ISG is well on its way. Alignment with ETSI’s APIs and data models is a continuous process in ONAP and OSM and will continue across NFV releases. The longstanding and well established cooperation between Anuket and the ISG’s TST working group will continue as well and even be reinforced with a potential new topic on the integration of API conformance testing in Anuket’s Functest project. Besides, testing activities, Anuket’s suggested 3 new items for future collaboration:
- Interface between the Container Infrastructure Service Management (CISM ) function and the Container Infrastructure Service (CIS);
- Interface between the CISM and/or VIM and a hardware management function;
- Infrastructure abstractions, e.g., hardware acceleration, networking services.
The CNCF’s presentation confirmed that Cloud-Native design is an area for future collaboration, an activity already started within the framework of the ETSI NFV&MEC 2021 API PlugTest event.
The NFV Evolution event also featured 2 panel discussions. The first panel discussed operational experience and pain points in the development and use of technologies based on the NFV standards. The panel, moderated by Guy Daniels from Telecom TV, included representatives from Telefonica, Huawei, NTT DOCOMO and HPE.
- Diego R. Lopez, Senior Technology Expert, Telefónica
- Yun Chao Hu, Senior Director Strategies, Standardization and Industry Development, Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH
- Yoshihiro Nakajima, Manager, Core Network Development Department, NTT DOCOMO
- Marie-Paule Odini, Distinguished Technologist, HPE Communications & Media Solutions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
From this panel discussion, let us retain that while large scale NFV deployments are a reality, Plug & Play VNFs are not yet a reality. Closing the interoperability gap should thus be a constant concern for the ISG NFV.
The event ended with a second panel discussion that gathered the presenters (or teams) of the 6 selected technical presentations. Event attendees were given the opportunity to engage with the presenters and ask questions. The comparison between Telco Cloud and Public Cloud, the support of multiple network domain deployments (e.g., access and core), as well as the cloud-native/automation features and the related work items in ETSI NFV were discussed. All panelists were asked to share their thoughts on what they expect NFV Release 5 to address with priority. Additionally this panel discussion reemphasized that cross-organizational cooperation, including the collaboration of standards and open source communities, will still be the industrial foundation for the sustainable and healthy development of NFV in the future.
Recordings of all presentations and panel discussions are still available on-line, here:
