Alex Stancu provides insight on the completion of ONF’s second wireless transport SDN PoC.
We recently completed ONF’s second wireless transport Proof of Concept (PoC) to continue advancing the industry’s commercial adoption of SDN. The second PoC was a success, with wide participation from the wireless transport industry. I provided some insight into how the project came together in a contributed piece for SDxCentral. Here is an excerpt from that article:
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm that emerged in the networking industry in order to mitigate the limitations proven by traditional networks, such as complexity, difficult management and configuration, or vendor dependency. SDN was adopted initially in campus networks, then in data centers, and now researchers are trying to introduce it in all of the aspects of a network, from optical domain, wireless transport networks to Internet exchange points. Last October, the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) Wireless Transport project completed the industry’s first multi-vendor Wireless Transport SDN Proof of Concept (PoC). Furthering ONF’s goal of promoting greater commercial adoption of SDN, the PoC was designed to encourage the development, testing, and implementation of an open source controller capable of managing a multi-vendor microwave network.
Over the past six months, the project developed and executed a second PoC at Telefónica’s German offices in Munich. Several entities that form the Wireless Transport project, including equipment vendors Ceragon, Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, and SIAE; integrators and application providers such as HCL, Tech Mahindra, highstreet technologies, and Wipro; and operators AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica joined forces to demonstrate the applicability of this information model in an SDN environment.
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.
Read the complete article on SDxCentral to learn more about ONF’s second wireless transport SDN PoC. We’ve also put together a white paper to summarize the full details of the PoC, which can be found here.
- Alex Stancu, Ceragon Networks
