ONF’s Open Transport Working Group completes its third PoC in one year.
Over the past year, we have been working on various Proof of Concept events (PoC’s) to continue the advancement of the industry’s commercial adoption of SDN. In October 2015, ONF’s Open Transport Working Group completed the industry’s first multi-vendor Wireless Transport SDN PoC. The PoC was designed to encourage the development, testing, and implementation of open SDN for Wireless Transport and to demonstrate multi-layer optimization on an open SDN infrastructure. Following the first PoC, the group was able to complete the second PoC six months later. Today, we are proud to announce that work has been completed on the third Wireless Transport PoC in North Brunswick, New Jersey hosted by AT&T.
Wireless transport networks are a key component of existing network deployments. The need for capillarity (i.e., extension of the service reach) to provide the sufficient network coverage demanded by end users resides greatly on wireless transport networks connecting access nodes to aggregation domains. Being a huge area of investment by network operators, it is a desirable objective to simplify and facilitate the roll-out and run of this network segment.
The third PoC was focused on demonstrating the capabilities and benefits of utilizing a Common Information Model for multi-vendor control of wireless network elements through open management interfaces. We had wide participation from the wireless transport industry including operator representatives, microwave equipment vendors, integrators and applications providers. The work on the latest PoC built upon the use cases identified in the first two PoC’s by the group.
Three new uses cases were included in this PoC to demonstrate wireless transport SDN applications illustrating planning and discovery, with dynamic view in real time, configuration, discrepancy monitoring and detection, and event handing. The following new use cases were implemented and were the subject of this PoC:
- Closed Loop automation: capability of the network controller to react on defined notifications and re-provision the entire network.
- Test automation: a framework capable to define and apply scripts to a multi-vendor network for testing purpose.
- Spectrum management: interference management can cause a re-provisioning of the frequency according to local plans.
The PoC was followed by a panel discussion where the PoC participants discussed SDN in microwave networks and how what has been demonstrated can be proved in field in the coming months.
The team is working to finalize a white paper about the latest PoC as an industry reference for supporting SDN in microwave networks and will publish the document to the ONF website once complete. We look forward to continuing our work within ONF’s Open Transport Working Group and furthering the adoption of the SDN ecosystem.
- Giorgio Cazzaniga, Optics Product Manager at SM-Optics, Member of ONF’s Open Transport Working Group
