In its first blog posting of the year, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) detailed the results of its fifth SDN proof-of-concept trial.
The POC trial was hosted by Telefónica in Munich, Germany, this past November. The goal of the latest POC for wireless transport was to verify the functionalities and completeness of a row of technology specific information models that are required for meeting the long-term target of a vendor-agnostic multilayer and multidomain transport SDN architecture, according to the ONF blog that was written by the POC team.
"The ONF has a vibrant community pursuing information models to enable SDN configuration and control of multivendor networks," said ONF's Timon Sloane, vice president of marketing and ecosystem, in an email to FierceTelecom. "This work is pursued within the ONF's Open Information Model & Tooling and Open Transport Config & Control projects. These groups have published a number of specifications that taken together help enable multivendor interoperability under common SDN control.
"Most recently, 21 companies collaborated to bring together a multivendor POC leveraging this work to demonstrate the power of these models and of an open community collaborating to drive innovation."
The participation of the 21 companies was a record number for ONF's SDN POC, which first started in 2015 with the second POC taking place a year later.
RELATED: ONF operators push reference designs out for membership review
ONF is driven by its operator membership, which includes AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Google, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, NTT Group and Turk Telecom. The most recent POC was supervised by AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica.
The microwave vendors that took part were Ceragon, Ericsson, Huawei, Intracom Telecom, NEC, Nokia, SIAE Microelettronica and ZTE. The three optical vendors were ADVA, Infinera and SM Optics while the software application providers included Enghouse Networks, highstreet technologies, Indra Sistemas, MaycomOsi, Mentopolis, SIAE Microelettronica, Tech Mahindra and Wipro.
All told, there were more than 40 participants on hand to conduct the tests and present the results.
"The wide participations is very promising and important for adoption of the open-source models and open interfaces across whole industry," the POC team wrote in its blog.
The POC used OpenDaylight's SDN-RAN controller as the network domain controller for tasks such as mobile backhaul. Specifically, OpenDaylight's Oxygen release, which has been adopted for upstream use by ONAP, was used. Both ONAP and OpenDaylight are part of the Linux Foundation's LF Networking umbrella that was designed to provide a platform for cross-project collaboration.
The microwave and optical devices in the POC used a standardized NETCONF/YANG interface to communicate either directly or via mediator with the controller.
"The so called mediator is a piece of software that translates the standard interface into the device-specific proprietary protocol (e.g. SNMP) and vice-versa," according to the blog. "The applications running on top of the controller were connected via a RESTCONF interface, which implemented the exact same information models as at the southbound. This was allowing to manage the different vendors’ devices with the same applications.
"All the presented applications and mediators have been successfully executed and demonstrated."
The POC focused on the following four main areas:
• The demonstration and validation of the latest version of the Microwave Model according to TR-532 Rel. 1.1. "The maturity of the model was proved by the adoption in wide range of advanced applications enabling among others configuration of devices, preventive maintenance, performance monitoring and analysis, planning and maintenance of microwave links," according to the blog.
• The demonstration of the implementation of photonic model for vendor-agnostic management of optical transponders in partially disaggregated networks. The implementation was based on the ONF Core information model and the TAPI technology extension.
• The demonstration of the implementation of the basic model for Ethernet PHY.
• The demonstration of the first implementations of the Device Management Interface Profile.
"The proof of concept as a so-called implementation driven standardization is an important way towards industry broad adoption of open SDN model for microwave and further transport technologies," according to the POC team. "As the main output of fifth POC, the verified and validated microwave SDN model based on TR-532 Rel. 1.1, including interface validator and reference implementation, is now available on the market and ready for deployment."