MEF advances wholesale Ethernet ordering, provisioning concepts on SDN, NFV platforms

The MEF has put out a new report that highlights new advances in the creation of LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) capabilities and APIs designed to streamline wholesale ordering and provisioning of Ethernet services over multiple service provider networks.

In the report, the MEF outlines recommendations and objectives from various teams that participated in the Euro16 LSO Hackathon held in late April.

The event, which involved more than 45 individuals from 19 organizations, took place after the MEF published its LSO Reference Architecture & Framework (MEF 55).

What's important about this work is that it will give service providers a LSO framework to transition away from a silo-structured BSS/OSS approach towards flexible end-to-end service orchestration that leverages the benefits of SDN and NFV.

Euro16 LSO Hackathon teams worked on two major OpenLSO scenarios: inter-carrier ordering and service function chaining.

For the inter-carrier ordering scenario, LSO Hackathon participants successfully initiated an order for a CE 2.0 Access Ethernet Private Line (EPL) service between a service provider and a network operator across the LSO Sonata Reference Point that supports management and operations interactions between network providers. Additionally, participants provided feedback to progress MEF work on standardized ordering of CE 2.0 services. The team included representatives from AT&T, Ciena, Ericsson, CableLabs and Amdocs.

During the Service Function Chaining portion of the event, LSO Hackathon participants demonstrated injection of a virtual firewall into a live CE 2.0 E-Line service using TOSCA templates. For this demonstration, participants injected Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) into a CE 2.0 service in the LSO Hackathon environment. It also involved collaboration with MEF members working on LSO Presto Network Resources Provisioning (NRP) APIs. Representatives from Gigaspaces, Cisco, Huawei, NetCracker, Telecom Italia Sparkle, CenturyLink, and Iometrix took part in this effort.

Euro16 Hackathon teams also worked on two of the multiple emerging uses cases identified by MEF including Packet WAN and Data Center.

The MEF said the next LSO Hackathon will take place at the MEF16 (www.MEF16.com) global networking conference held on 7-10 November 2016 at the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland. At that time, LSO Hackathon work will be extended to support overarching Third Network service projects built upon underlying OpenLSO scenarios and OpenCS use cases.

For more:
- see the release

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