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Open Networking Foundation Completes Industry's First Wireless Transport SDN Proof of Concept
[October 13, 2015]

Open Networking Foundation Completes Industry's First Wireless Transport SDN Proof of Concept


SDN AND OPENFLOW WORLD CONGRESS - The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), has 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 open SDN for Wireless Transport and to demonstrate multi-layer optimization on an open SDN infrastructure. This PoC originated in ONF's Open Transport Working Group and evolved from a specification into an open source software project in the OpenSourceSDN.org community that ONF sponsors and that is open to the public.

ONF member companies Ceragon Networks, Coriant, Ericsson, Huawei, NEC (News - Alert) and SM Optics (SIAE MICROELETTRONICA group) participated in the PoC testing, held October 7-9, 2015 in Madrid. Participating member companies provided the networking equipment and software consistent with the SDN architecture and leveraged the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) open source SDN controller. Testing was hosted by Telefónica (News - Alert) and IMDEA Networks Institute, with supprt from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.



"ONF is thrilled to see this PoC realized and grateful to Telefónica for serving as host of the first ever industry wireless transport SDN PoC on the IMDEA Networks premises," said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. "The wireless extensions and abstraction of the ONF SDN controller, architecture, and protocols are the foundation for a more efficient and dynamic way of controlling and managing backhaul networks. These represent a major portion of operator's investment. Achieving such flexibility through common control mechanisms in a multi-vendor environment will facilitate the operational tasks and will enable automation and coordination with other segments and layers of the network."

The PoC demonstrated the flexibility and programmability of a multi-layer transport network controlled by a SDN controller for efficient network resource utilization - including the ability to reduce operational costs and meet future dynamic business demands. Initial use cases successfully tested during the PoC included capacity-driven air interface and flow-based shaping. The capacity-driven use case demonstrates a network's ability to adapt to traffic demand and to efficiently optimize wireless resources for a more energy efficient operation of the transport network. The flow-based shaping use case demonstrates the network's ability to adapt and respond to changing conditions such as the weather impacting wireless transport networks. This use case correlates the traffic load through the Coriant (News - Alert) transport routers with the quality of wireless transport links for better overall network optimization and traffic utilization.


About ONF

Launched in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon (News - Alert), and Yahoo!, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a growing nonprofit organization with more than 130 members whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of open SDN. ONF promotes open SDN and OpenFlow technologies and standards while fostering a vibrant market of products, services, applications, customers, and users. For further details visit the ONF website at: http://www.opennetworking.org.


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