LF Networking's Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) announced on Tuesday the availability of its fourth software release, which is called Dublin.
ONAP was formed in early 2017 after the Linux Foundation combined ECOMP, which was developed by AT&T, with OPEN-O, which was backed by China Mobile. ONAP is an end-to-end orchestration and automation platform for the telecom industry.
The Dublin release includes updates to existing blueprints, such as 5G, virtual customer premise equipment (vCPE) and voice over LTE (VoLTE), as well as a new broadband blueprint that is being led by Swisscom.
The broadband service (BBS) blueprint is being developed for multi-gigabit residential connectivity over passive optical network (PON) using ONAP for orchestration and lifecycle management, and for the automatic re-registration of an optical line terminal (OLT) when there's a change of location, which ONAP refers to as nomadic ONT.
The Linux Foundation's Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, orchestration, edge, and IoT, said since the Casablanca software release came out in December, ONAP has continued to gain traction with commercial deployments by service providers such as AT&T, Bell Canada and Orange, as well as new proof-of-concept trials and tests by China Mobile, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, KT, Reliance Jio, Turk Telecom, Bringcom, Swisscom, Telstra, and TIM that could lead to additional production deployments by the end of 2019.
On the vendor side, Aarna Networks, Amdocs, Boco, Huawei, and ZTE announced a pure-play ONAP distribution or products based on ONAP. In addition, new demos and support services were made available by Accenture, Ampere, Arris, Ciena, iconectiv, Netsia, Ribbon, Rift, Pantheon, Wipro, Ericsson, Nokia, and Tech Mahindra.
"We have broad adoption from both end users, vendors and system integrators around their products that have kind of crossed the tipping point," Joshipura said.
Along with the release of Dublin, ONAP announced six new members: Aarna Networks, Loodse, the LIONS Center at Pennsylvania State University, Matrixx Software, VoeEire AB and XCloud Networks.
RELATED: LF Networking expands compliance program to include VNFs
At the Open Networking Summit in April, an expanded OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) was launched that included VNF verification through publicly-available VNF testing tools based on requirements that were developed within ONAP.
The Dublin release added a Vendor Software Product (VSP) compliance check in the service design and creation (SDC) modeling and design tool.
In conjunction with the Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT), which was announced by the Linux Foundation and GSMA late last month, the OVP compliance program is working towards a common set of NFVi (networking function virtualization infrastructures) and compliance for non-operator VNFs.
Joshipura said that currently operators are consumed by on-boarding virtual network functions (VNFs), management and network orchestration (MANO), and virtual machines (VMs), which the OVP compliance program and task force are working to resolve.
"ONAP is now a critical part of the OVP compliance program," Joshipura said.
Joshipura also touted the cooperation among open source communities and standards-development organizations. ONAP has collaborated with ETSI NFV ISG, ETSI ZSM ISG, the TM Forum, MEF and 3GPP.
"We announced the O-RAN partnership from a software community perspective, so we're working on that," Joshipura said. "The Akraino edge stack, which is the release that just came, out now includes ONAP as a zero touch, or orchestration, lightweight implementation from a blueprint perspective. Acumos which is our LF AI (artificial intelligence) project, will be integrated with ONAP in an upcoming release. So there's a there's quite a bit of cross project collaboration happening in the community, which really brings lots of choices and simple solutions to the operators."
The next ONAP release, which is called El Alto, is scheduled to come out this fall. AT&T's Catherine Lefèvre, who is the ONAP technical steering committee chair, said ONAP is shortening its release cycles. The Frankfort release, which is slated for early next year, will follow on the heels of El Alto.