Radisys was invited to speak at the GNTC 2018 Conference in Nanjing to share our experiences with demonstrating and trialing CORD with Operator across the Globe. It has been around two years now that Radisys has been the Preferred System Integrator Partner for the ONF and during the course of that time we have been invited to work with many Operators to demonstrate the initial CORD Exemplar capabilities and to work extensively with these same Operators to build up the capabilities and customize CORD for specific Operators Network deployments.
At the GNTC 2018 Conference we shared the deployment issues we ran into including;
- Installation Complexity,
- Hardcoded system configuration
And missing Features such as:
- Traffic Management
- Ability to support Multiple Access Technologies without burdening VOLTHA Core with needing to understand the details/complexities of each Access Technology
- Scalability Testing/Hardening
- Life Cycle Management
- Performance Monitoring
- Customize Services (HSIA, Voice, Video, Multicast)
- ONU and Subscriber Authentication Customization
Fortunately, over the last couple of years, the maturity of the Open Source code base has greatly matured and with contributions/guidance from Operators such as AT&T and DT and the efforts of the Vendor community such as Radisys and the work of the ONF many of the early problems have been overcome.
However even with the SEBA Exemplar as a working basis for Operator deployments and the efforts of Radisys, ONF and the Community around support of a Clean Switch Abstraction with OpenFlow as the mechanism for Service deployment in combination with Technology Profiles, there is still much customization and integration work to be done especially around the FCAPS Management interface areas which will need to be adapted to each Operators deployment model.
The take away from the discussion on the Radisys deployment Experience was that yes the ONF and Community have come a long way in the last couple of years but there is still a need for customization work especially around integrating SEBA with the Operators Back Office Systems where a NEM or NEM equivalent needs to be fully developed and integrated.
