NFV at MWC 2016
ETSI showcased a practical implementation of NFV at the Mobile World Congress 2016. They showed the whole NFV Architecture being implemented and run to provide a SIP voice call. An end to end communication service of a SIP call was made based on a vIMS platform. This vIMS is an NFV VNF orchestrated by a NFV Orchestrator run on top of Infrastructure controlled by an Openstack based VIM. Let’s see the components and how they made the NFV based SIP voice call.
There are two NFVI PoPs (Points of Presence) or two VIMs. One is Openstack controlled and the other is controlled by openvim (part of OpenMano package). Both are controlled by the Open Mano NFVO for resource orchestration. The Service Orchestration is performed by Ubuntu’s Juju. The launchpad of Rift.io is used as triggering mechanism for resource orchestration and service orchestration. 6wind provides the PEs showcasing corporate VPN interconnectivity. Telefonica provides the traffic generator to test the bandwidth capacity of the PE links and Metaswitch provides the VNF vIMS Clearwater for being run atop the infrastructure.
The figure below shows details:
A multi-site corporation’s network is shown to be running connected via 3 PEs. One site which is connecting to PE 3 has the VNF deployed in VIM2 which is another Data Center. One NFVI PoP labelled VIM 1 is hosting the 6wind PEs while the second NFVI labelled VIM 2 is hosting the VNF. There is interDC communications going on between the two NFVI PoPs. The figure below shows the SIP voice calls communication logical path. The IMS protocols SIP signaling is implemented in VIM 2 in the Metaswitch Clearwater vIMS.
More details can be seen here.
ETSI’s new initiative is delivering an open source NFV Management and Orchestration software stack which is set take away attention from the MANO and turn it into a given piece of software. This puts more focus on the VNFs. The message could be that Service Orchestration using VNFs are therefore to be the focus of attention for Telco organizations.
Habib Lutfullah | Chief Technologist NFV/SDN
Telecom Network Services & Solutions (TNSS Global)
Sydney, Australia
References:
http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/nfv
https://networkbuilders.intel.com/docs/E2E-Service-Instantiation-with-Open-Source-MANO.pdf
