By: Aseem Parikh, VP of Solutions and Partnerships, ONF, and Li Han, Ph.D, Vice Director, China Mobile Research Institute
On July 14th to 18th, 2017, ONF together with China Mobile deployed a test CORD platform at china mobile lab in Beijing. This consisted of three CORD™ PODs (simulating three central offices) for building a PoC delivering Enterprise and Mobile service on demand. At the same time, a workshop on the CORD platform and enterprise and mobile service deployment was successfully held, bringing together experts from China Mobile Research Institute, ONF, OpenFlow® switch vendors such as Accton and others.
E-CORD Demonstration & Workshop | China Mobile & ONF, Beijing
From left: Alice Wang, Duan Xiaodong, Zack Williams, Luca Prete, Marc De Leenheer,
Madam Yang Zhiquiang, Aseem Parikh, Lisa Gao, Li Han, Zhou Wenhui & Huang Lu
Back in April, ONF had a chance to present ONOS and CORD project updates to Madam Yang and the China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI) leadership. The productive meeting explored CORD’s fit in China Mobile’s vision for a transformed network infrastructure running on open source software leveraging commodity hardware. Specifically, CMRI expressed interest in trialing Enterprise CORD (E-CORD) and Mobile CORD (M-CORD) in their labs
The first several weeks were spent collaborating over email and phone calls to ensure that, a) the right hardware was available to host CORD at CMRI and b) appropriate knowledge was transferred to CMRI about the overall architecture build and installation of CORD. Our first challenge was to procure the required CORD compatible Ethernet switches. ONF and China Mobile enlisted help from Debbie Chu, CEO of Nocsys (a subsidiary of Accton/Edgecore in China), who agreed to provide the required switches. In parallel, with remote help from ONF and great ingenuity, the CMRI technical experts overcame numerous challenges and made lots of customizations to successfully install and run CORD-in-a-box (CIAB). Lessons learned will be incorporated in an upcoming distribution of CORD to streamline CORD deployment process.
Once the hardware was available, and after learning from hands-on experience with CORD, CMRI invited ONF experts to Beijing to jointly bring up E-CORD with a view to observe and learn from each other. The joint teams installed all three CORD PODs from scratch, noting all the changes they had to make to the scripts. These learnings will be invaluable to ensure the future releases of CORD can be more easily consumed by operators in China.
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One of the Three E-CORD PODs at China Mobile Research Institute Labs[/caption]
The week’s work was successfully demonstrated to CMRI leadership in a day-long workshop. Despite a few setbacks, our joint team was pleased to get CORD up-and-running at China Mobile.
As a next phase, China Mobile is proceeding to deeply understand the E-CORD architecture and is keenly interested in building several proof-of-concepts by leveraging the programmability and VNF onboarding onto the CORD platform.
ONF and China Mobile invite the growing CORD community and ecosystem to collaborate on the building of the following PoCs: Enterprise Bandwidth-on-Demand (E-BoD) Service controller;
- Enterprise Bandwidth-on-Demand (E-BoD) Service controller;
- Sliced Packet Network (SPN) as being proposed by CM for 5G backhaul;
- vOLT for 10G PON;
- Software-defined CPE (SD-CPE).
All CORD collaborators interested in participating in one or more of these activities are welcome to write to the authors at lihan [at] chinamobile [dot] com or aseem [at] opennetworking [dot] org.
CORD and ONOS are trademarks of Open Networking Foundation (ONF).
