Over the last ten years, technological advancements across the world have been remarkable, with the number of things that can be connected growing exponentially. By 2025, it is expected that more than 75 billion devices will be connected to the Internet worldwide. As the decade unfolds, demand will only increase for different types of streaming services and high bandwidth-consuming applications. Therefore, the need to support these coming applications will continue to mount.
To effectively do this, operators and vendors must focus on lowering costs for service deployment, fostering greater interoperability for deployment flexibility, and shortening service deployment times for market agility, whilst maintaining Quality of Experience (QoE). Paving the way for these new requirements is Broadband Forum, which is unifying the best of open standards and open source to deliver the agile technologies that enable the necessary network transformations and services of the future.
The rise of cloudification
Emerging technologies such as 5G and the proliferation of devices driven by the Internet of Things (IoT) have applied significant pressures to the network architecture. As a result, cloud technologies including Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have become a key business consideration.
By introducing cloud concepts into the Central Office (CO), operators can make their networks more agile and scalable by improving flow control and enhancing functional flexibility. With operators well-versed in the benefits of this, it is no surprise how quickly the number of networks leveraging these technologies has grown. For example, the global telecoms cloud market is expected to grow from 9 billion dollars in 2016 to $29 billion dollars by 2021.
However, the challenges around deployment, migrating to a cloud-based CO and how new and old technologies can co-exist remain.
Overcoming the challenges
Addressing these challenges through standardization is Broadband Forum’s Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) initiative. This open interface is a recasting of the Central Office hosting infrastructure that utilizes NFV, SDN and cloud technologies to support network functions. The CloudCO’s functionality can be accessed through a northbound API, allowing Operators, or third parties, to consume its functionality, while hiding how the functionality is achieved from the API consumer. The system acts as a foundation for an ecosystem to evolve, helping the thriving community of suppliers and service providers in their quest to embrace the cloud with all the benefits that interoperability brings.
Unifying open source and open standards in this way is key for network automation and ensuring the efficient delivery of broadband access technologies like cloud, NFV and SDN. Open standards are needed in order to align the industry on common architecture and migration approaches. Without these standards, operators would not be able to protect their existing asset investments and launch new opportunities for service development. Together with open source, standardization will enable seamless co-existence, by ensuring existing equipment can interoperate with new technologies, eliminating the need for all the equipment to be replaced.
Part of CloudCO, one ‘open source’ solution which has gained significant traction is Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband - Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA). This allows accelerated deployment of cloud-based access infrastructure and services and facilitates co-existence and migration. OB-BAA can be adapted to many software defined access models and the speed at which service providers can now deploy standardized cloud-based infrastructures has notably improved. This added functionality has enabled flexible solutions needed by SDN/NFV-based networks.
The OB-BAA project is designed to be deployed within the Forum’s CloudCO environment as one or more virtualized network functions (VNFs). It specifies Northbound Interfaces (NBI), Core Components and Southbound Adaptation Interfaces (SAI) for functions associated with the access network devices that have been virtualized. Building on previous releases of the OB-BAA code distributions, Broadband Forum has most recently published Release 3.0 of its Open Broadband - Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) open-source project. Release 3.0 provides capabilities to manage Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) based Access Nodes via the vendor's adapters, thus accelerating migration to SDN-based automation platforms. Release 3.0 aims to take OB-BAA to the next level, providing operators with the tools to monitor and enhance network performance, cost-effectively and efficiently.
Collaboration is key
The revolution of the broadband industry is now upon us - and a wide variety of different requirements have to be addressed by operators across the world. The involvement of the whole industry in the standards process is needed to ensure that the new standards developed for the world of automation are scalable and far-reaching.
Overall, OB-BAA will make it possible for operators to migrate to and manage programmable network environments, where new services can be deployed rapidly through interaction with the common abstraction of Access Nodes. Operators and equipment manufacturers will be able to reap the benefits of greater networking flexibility and be able to streamline development by implementing standard interfaces, while differentiating their service offering via stable standardized platforms.
Facilitating an agile, flexible and integrated approach, OB-BAA allows service providers to embrace the best of open source and open standards, creating a programmable broadband network which delivers on the promise of next-generation broadband, while reducing service providers’ costs and protecting their investments.
To learn more about Broadband Forum’s work on Open Broadband Software, please click here.
