The Broadband Forum continues to collaborate with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s (ETSI) Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV ISG) after agreeing a formal liaison relationship last year.

The collaboration aims to achieve a consistent approach and common architecture for the infrastructure needed to support virtualized network functions, and will help the industry channel its efforts towards achieving a rapid roll-out of NFV solutions.

NFV grew out of carriers’ need to embrace adoption of cloud technologies, open platforms and interfaces for enhanced service delivery in their networks, which would reduce complexity, enhance scalability and speed time to market. These new innovative software based technologies will co-exist with current multi-vendor environments, making interoperability a key requirement as well the need for cooperation amongst the various organizations developing standards and specifications.

After meeting with ETSI’s NFV ISG in July of this year, the Broadband Forum will help bring NFV solutions and related technologies into operation and help make them the mainstay of the networking industry.

Dr. Steven Wright, Chairman, ETSI NFV ISG, said: “Working with organizations such as the Broadband Forum sends a strong message that we want to promote implementation and interoperability of NFV technologies through collaboration with partner organizations. A lot of valuable work is already making NFV a reality, however with the Forum’s support, we will continue to develop the NFV ecosystem.”

NFV is at the center of discussion at this week’s Broadband Forum quarterly meeting in Dublin, Ireland, which kicks off with a special session solely dedicated to NFV. This is the second session the Broadband Forum has held on NFV, and is aimed at stimulating a thorough discussion on the issues, possibilities and proposals for working on NFV-related projects and how Open Source software may be used.
“The pace of development in NFV has been astonishing so, by supporting and working together with ETSI’s NFV ISG, which is at the heart of NFV developments, we can continue to develop further guidance and detailed specifications for the industry,” said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum.

“As operators worldwide look to meet the challenge of delivering the Internet of Things, our work is empowering them by simplifying the roll-out of new network services, reducing deployment and operational costs and encouraging innovation that gives users a dynamic and robust experience with new services.”

The special sessions are generating many new ideas (many of which are directed at migration issues as well as how the Forum should address topics like management of networks with both virtualized and traditional elements), but the Broadband Forum has many NFV activities already underway, which include:

• WT-345 Migrating to NFV in the context of TR-178 (the current Multi-Service Broadband Network – MSBN)
• SD-340 Introducing NFV into the MSBN
• SD-313 SDN in Broadband Networks (high level requirements and a framework for)
• WT-317 Network Enhanced Residential Gateway architecture (partial virtualizing of RG functions)
• WT-328 Virtual Business Gateway
• SD-326 Flexible Service Chaining

The industry can expect that the results from many of these projects, including proposals at the special session in Dublin, will be delivered at pace during 2015.