Broadband Forum, ONF Partner for Path to Automated Access Networks
The Broadband Forum and the Open Networking Foundation have reached an agreement on how broadband operators can leverage open source and standardization projects to help with migrations to automated access networks.
The two groups point out that many new business opportunities are rising for broadband providers, meaning the need for new services to be rapidly deployed, while often using third-party applications to work across disparate, software-defined networks.
In order to take advantage of such opportunities, operators will need to interconnect different parts of their networks with open source solutions and systems from various suppliers.
A describes projects the groups are working on:
- Open Broadband-Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) is a BBF project that enables SDN-based management and control of multi-vendor, multi-technology access networks via a standard abstraction northbound interface. It is designed to support co-existence and seamless migration, bringing the agility to adapt to a wide variety of software defined access models. The OB-BAA project is designed to be able to pull together differing access device types, including legacy implementations, under a single standardized network and service management and control umbrella.
- ONF’s SDN Enabled Broadband Access (SEBA) platform takes a disaggregated white-box approach to building next generation access networks leveraging open source. Functionality traditionally run on chassis-based OLTs and on BNG routers is instead run in the cloud. The hardware consists of only a collection of simple white-box OLTs, switches and servers. Open source hardware and software helps provide a comprehensive platform.
- ONF’s Virtual OLT Hardware Abstraction (VOLTHA) is an open source software project that abstracts a PON network to make it manageable as if it were a standard OpenFlow switch. DHCP and user authentication and other functionality are run as open source in the cloud, giving operators control over functions that have traditionally been embedded in vendors’ tightly integrated chassis solutions.