VOLTHA shapshot project update from Saurav Das - ONF Engineering Director and VOLTHA project lead
VOLTHA presents a hardware-abstraction for a wireline access network (typically PON), making the PON system appear as a pseudo-Ethernet/OpenFlow switch to a northbound SDN controller like ONOS. It offers a common control and management framework shared by all OLTs and ONUs. VOLTHA allows operators to treat all OLTs uniformly, minimizing proprietary interfaces and easing use of multi vendor solutions.
VOLTHA is the primary Access Network driver in the SEBA reference implementation. It is targeted for production trials at AT&T, DT and Telefonica and has gained tremendous interest from 10+ other operators, more than half of whom have it in their labs.
VOLTHA Features & Roadmap
VOLTHA 1.4 (Current Version)
- Deployment & management of VOLTHA containers have migrated to Kubernetes.
- New OpenOLT adaptor being developed for white-box OLTs (including EdgeCore XGS-PON OLT) by ONF to reduce the bar for other whitebox OLT vendors to become VOLTHA compatible, and promote a more SDN like, bottom-up discovery approach to VOLTHA operation.
- AT&T Foundry has joined ONF in OpenOLT development
ROADMAP
VOLTHA 1.5 and 2.0 are planned for release in the latter part of 2018. Features for the releases include
- Technology Profiles – A way to make VOLTHA adapt to technology differences between various access network flavors, and various operator service/business needs for upstream/downstream Traffic-Management/QoS
- Restructuring of VOLTHA core to a set of microservices implemented in Golang with all OLT and ONU adaptors which are currently part of the core to be separated out into their own containers
- Open OMCI development
- FCAPS with Kafka based implementation for OLT/ONU alarm & event reporting, and use of systems external to VOLTHA to act on them
- ponsimv2 PON emulator for VOLTHA (control + data plane) to make it more usable in other environments
- BBSim PON simulator for VOLTHA scale/performance testing
ONF is establishing a distributed DevOps model for the development of VOLTHA 1.5 and it’s integration into SEBA with support from AT&T and Turk Telekom/Netsia along with supply chain partners Ciena and Adtran.
More information on this project can be found on the project wiki.
