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External Landscape - Other open source projects, Standards Definition Organizations (SDOs)

Editor - Lingli Deng

As an open source community where operators lead the reference implementation of next-generation network construction, LFN has been committed to the collaboration of standards and open source since its establishment, and has promoted cross-organizational industry cooperation by publishing a series of white papers.

The traditional communication service provider has a relatively simple business form, has a long network construction and service introduction cycle, and is accustomed to business operations based on user access, and basic network planning, construction, and maintenance according to the physical network technology field. Hence, we are now facing a divided CT industry chain with highly standardized network functions (or NFs in short) as well as highly customized operation and maintenance management.

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Figure 1    Traditional communication network technology domain Landscape

In order to break the closed business R & D ecology and equipment R & D ecology of the communications industry, the industry's leading CSPs joined hands in creating Linux Foundation Networking (or LFN in short), as a vehicle to unite industry forces such as standards and open source, hoping to build a truly OPEN next-generation network innovation technology ecosystem.

This "openness" is embodied in the following three aspects:

• Open infrastructure: Through the dis-aggregation between software and hardware for telecommunications equipment, it is now possible for the CT industry to share common hardware infrastructure with the IT industry, and even further promote jointly to a common open hardware platform, which brings in the benefits for innovation and scale as a result of the industrial integration of CT and IT in the hardware level.
• Open NF O&M: Through the dis-aggregation between the control plane, data planes and management plane of NF software, combined with a generalized and standardized end-to-end orchestration platform to stitch centralized control and management domain controllers, is driving a transition of the NF software from complex monolithic systems to sophisticated micro services. On the one hand, it can better learn and draw on the advanced technology of common IT architecture and public software components, and on the other hand, it would help lower the entry barrier standard of small and medium equipment providers and promote industrial integration at the level of CT and IT software.
• Open business customization: Through the decoupling of the general business design orchestration management platform from specific business scenarios and specific professional fields, the “Lego building block” type of business design and deployment, operation and maintenance customization capabilities are realized and opened, and basic network service providers, Communication business service providers and vertical industry service providers as well as end-user industry convergence at the business level.

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Figure 2 Vision of Next Generation Network Technology Landscape (w. LFN)

As shown in the figure, in order to achieve the three-level open target vision described above, it is necessary to provide standardized touching points for interoperability:

• with common infrastructure and management platform;
• with network elements in various network technology areas for Life cycle management (or LCM in short), collection, analysis and configuration control;
• to stitch across various network technologies to achieve an end-to-end service orchestration and capability exposure platform.