The Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) project from the Broadband Forum aims to create a virtualized infrastructure that enables zero-touch provisioning, service activation and session steering in a multivendor, white box environment. The project uses industry standard approaches and works within existing investments, according to the forum.

A platform demonstration at this year’s Broadband World Forum showed that the CloudCO can support multi-vendor service creation and activation in a virtualized and disaggregated multi-vendor network, the forum said.

A new gaming session steering application – which the Broadband Forum said was a world’s first – also was demonstrated. It enables operators to use CloudCO to detect changes in user traffic type, check network conditions against defined service levels and reprogram session steering to meet the service levels and preserve the user experience.

The key to CloudCO’s capabilities is that it “recasts central office hosting infrastructure” to use software defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV) and cloud technologies, the forum said. Key capabilities include disaggregated control plane functions in the access and edge networks, dynamic session steering, subscriber session steering and Broadband Access Abstraction (BAA) layer with disaggregated control and management plane functions.

“Dynamic session steering brings numerous benefits to a service provider’s business, allowing them to provide new and competitive service offerings with assurance capabilities that can seamlessly act on the network in a timely manner to ensure the assurance objectives of the service being offered,” Tim Carey, the Chairman of the Broadband Forum’s OB-BAA open source project, said in a press release.

Participants in the demonstration were consultancy and system integrator Reply and service providers BT, TIM and Vodafone. Engineers from Altice Labs, Capgemini Engineering, Broadcom, EANTC, Nokia, ufiSpace, VMware, and the University of New Hampshire – InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) also participated.