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Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei & Cisco Collaborate on NFV Interoperability Testing

Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei & Cisco Collaborate on NFV Interoperability Testing

Leading telecom technology vendors, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia & Cisco have signed a MoU to create the NFV Interoperability Testing Initiative (NFV-ITI) that will help communication service providers to address the challenges related to NFV deployment and Cloud transformation within multi-vendor network environments.

The deployment and integration of virtual network functions within today's multi-vendor environments can introduce new interoperability challenges. To address these challenges, NFV-ITI members will cooperatively support the interoperability of NFV elements in specific customer situations to accelerate the commercial implementations, and to reduce the time-to-market for new applications and services.

All the existing NFV interoperability related testing activities have been triggered by different needs of the industry, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Testing WG, OPNFV testing projects, Network Vendor Interoperability Testing (NVIOT) testing, and the New IP Agency (NIA) interoperability testing.

Complementing all the existing NFV interoperability testing activities in the industry, NFV-ITI will focus on testing interoperability configurations of commercial NFV solutions actually used in the communication service providers' networks.

It will recommend generic principles, including interoperability test cases, test criteria, processes, methods, guidelines, templates, and testing tools, and will also apply best practices from all existing interoperability testing activities in the industry, such as the NVIOT forum efforts. NFV-ITI aims to be aligned with the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group and the OPNFV project.

Martin Bäckström, vice president, Group Function Strategy & Technology, Ericsson
By driving industry alignments on interoperability testing in specific commercial deployments, NFV-ITI will accelerate industrialization of NFV and help to create an even stronger ecosystem that benefits operators, customers and vendors everywhere.

Ron Haberman, vice president, CloudBand, Nokia
Supporting the creation of the NFV-ITI is another step towards ensuring service providers can smoothly migrate to cloud networks within today's multi-vendor environment.While the network model is changing with NFV, the need for true carrier-grade performance remains paramount.

Author

Ray is a news editor at The Fast Mode, bringing with him more than 10 years of experience in the wireless industry.

For tips and feedback, email Ray at ray.sharma(at)thefastmode.com, or reach him on LinkedIn @raysharma10, Facebook @1RaySharma

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