In this community member profile we highlight Elia Battiston, Cloud Infrastructure Solutions and Systems Architect at Radisys, who is based in Milan, Italy. He has been an active contributor in the VOLTHA community since January 2022, when he joined the ONF as a Research Engineer Intern.
“Working in the ONF community has been inspiring, because it shows what collaboration between very skilled and knowledgeable people working towards a common goal can achieve. Being part of the leading edge innovation in networking which helps enable many aspects of today's life, is very exciting,” stated Elia.
Elia studied at the Polytechnic University of Milan, and holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Programming became one of his passions when he was in middle school, and he gradually pursued it as his profession. He started developing software and websites as a freelancer soon after he began attending the university, and worked as a Virtual Reality developer for approximately one year. He has always held a deep interest in the field of telecommunications because he liked the idea of designing ways to make complex systems work flawlessly together. For this reason, he focused his studies on networking following completion of his Bachelor's degree. He developed his master thesis on a framework for the orchestration of heterogeneous service function chains, using ONOS and P4, with Daniele Moro (former ONF employee, now at Intel) as co-advisor. Daniele provided him with an introduction to ONF.
Elia worked on enhancements for VOLTHA 2.10, fixing bugs for various components of the stack and expanding the functionality of BBSIM (e.g. simulation of POTS ports and CPON interfaces). He drove collaboration between ONF and the Broadband Forum (BBF) to create a compatibility/adaptation layer between VOLTHA's northbound interface and BBF's NETCONF/YANG interfaces, with the goal of enabling the use of VOLTHA in a BBF Cloud CO architecture. Today, he continues to work on the ONF/BBF collaboration, developing a VOLTHA component called "BBF Adapter" and following the definition of a standardized interface for it. A proof of concept using this work was demonstrated in the BBF stand at the recent NetworkX 2022.
