NFV causing re-think of standards process
One of the more significant challenges facing the network function virtualization market is how it’s handling the need for standards. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute is the main driver in terms of setting NFV standards for the telecom space. The organization recently released documents related to the completion of “phase one” work on establishing a framework for NFV.
The latest NFV documents include an infrastructure overview; an updated architectural framework; descriptions of the compute, hypervisor and network domains of the infrastructure; management and orchestration; security and trust; and resilience and service quality metrics. The documents build on the initial phase one work that was released in late 2013.
ETSI also announced that its NFV plans had entered “phase two” following the completion of an organization meeting in Arizona. Phase two work is set to include growing interoperability across the NFV ecosystem; specifying reference points and requirements that were defined in phase one; growing industry engagement to ensure that its NFV requirements are met; and clarifying how NFV intersects with other standards, including software-defined networking and open-source initiatives.
“ETSI’s NFV work needs to be given gold medals for defining and driving the environment,” praised Don McCullough, director of technology strategy at Ericsson.
Outside of ETSI, a number of organizations have recently popped up, either based around a certain vendor’s work in the NFV space that it then opened up to others to participate in developing, or more diverse organizations geared toward bringing vendors together to work on specific aspects of NFV. Those included OpenDaylight Project, Open Platform for NFV, ON.Lab and Open Stack.
Many of these organizations are looking to tackle certain slices of the NFV pie. For instance, the Linux Foundation’s OPNFV program said it “will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and to ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.”
“We are finding people want very similar things as well as some that are unique to their own work,” explained Margaret Chiosi, president of OPNFV and distinguished network architect at AT&T Labs, in explaining the role of OPNFV. “We are trying to work together and then hand off work between each other. Perhaps after another year we will have more need for collaboration, but to this point it’s somewhat limited by our respective scope.”
ETSI also announced a partnership with the Open Networking Foundation to further the development of NFV specifications. The organizations noted that the agreement focuses on how software-defined networking can enable forwarding-plane support for some NFV use cases.
“In particular, our two organizations will collaborate on the means to build dynamic, programmable virtualized network function forwarding graphs,” the organizations explained in a press release. “ETSI’s NFV [industry specifications group] has launched a call for NFV proofs of concept and published a PoC framework. ETSI is now keen to see PoCs that employ both NFV and SDN and showcase the benefits of both technologies.”
Many have praised the work of both official standards bodies like ETSI and newly formed organizations looking to foster a collaborative approach to advancing NFV technology.
“These organizations are really essential and critical to helping not just set the standards, but to help drive the pace of transformation,” noted Andre Fuetsch, SVP of architecture and design at AT&T.
Moving forward without standards
However, one challenge for the standards process is that such programs typically take several years, and the NFV community is looking to begin deployments in the coming months. This is expected to lead to many of the early deployments being rolled out using some proprietary standards that could at some point be upgraded to be standards compliant.
“Standards are a bit of a drag with some of the current thinking,” stated Kevin Riley, CTO at Sonus. “AT&T has said it wants to have NFV in 2016. It can’t wait for ETSI. Carriers are highly motivated due to their interest in optimizing their business operations as soon as possible. They are going to find a way for this to work. Sure, it’s a concern for future compatibility, but there is a forcing function coming from these carriers. They want to be at one place at a certain point.”
Others noted that unlike some recent mobile telecom-centric innovations, the NFV community is considerably larger and more diverse, which could further strain the ability to pull together some form of consensus.
“Similar to standards that went into place for VoLTE, where in 2009 there was no single way to deploy,” said Sandro Tavares, head of marketing for mobile core at Nokia Networks. “Every vendor had their own plan, though eventually we all came together to allow for interoperability. But there are a lot more companies now in the NFV space, with more than 200 vendors, instead of around 30 with VoLTE.”
The challenges are likely to require some flexibility in terms of how the mobile telecom market approaches NFV standards, which is something the industry is not accustomed to dealing with.
“We are used to working with 3GPP, which is a step-by-step process. With ETSI, it’s a more continuous evolution of a standard,” explained Monica Paolini, founder and president of Senza Fili Consulting. “Sure, it could be much faster and less linear in understood chunks. But it’s great to have the new players as they are going to push change and thinking of how the network should operate so they become more like fixed IP networks. … It will be a lot of learning, but managing mobility is always a major challenge and is more complex than managing fixed networks.”
With pressure coming from all sides, there seems to be some agreement that the standards process will need to include a bit of leeway, which would go against the whole idea of a standard. But, with the stakes as high as they are and the number of parties involved as deep as it is, maybe there is no choice.
“We need to learn in a different way how standardization happens,” said Ulrich Kohn, director of technical marketing at ADVA Optical Networking. “Maybe we just move forward with stable assurances of technology, and that is enough.”
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