Tuesday, February 14, 2017

OIF Completes SDN Transport Application Programming Interface (T-API) Testing

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) conducted a six-week long global testing of the Transport Application Programming Interface (T-API) standard from the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) with intra-lab and inter-lab testing across five carrier labs: China Telecom, China Unicom, SK Telecom, Telefonica and Verizon.

“As operators move from SDN PoCs and lab trials into commercial deployments, lack of interoperability between the SDN controllers and the orchestration layer above has quickly become the biggest technical barrier for many operators,” said Sterling Perrin, principal analyst, Heavy Reading. “Building a standardized northbound interface and successfully testing interoperability across different vendors and different networks – as the OIF has demonstrated – is a major step forward in addressing the northbound interface challenge and bringing SDN architectures to wide-scale commercial use.”


Thes testing included multi-domain orchestration of services delivered through Ethernet, OTN and optical switching. Carriers and vendors demonstrated how Virtual Network Functions (VNF) and SDN configured connectivity are combined to deliver service life cycle management.

Participating vendors include ADVA Optical Networking, Ciena, Coriant, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Infinera, Juniper Networks, NEC Corporation, Sedona Systems, and SM Optics. Consulting carriers include Orange and TELUS. Academic and/or research institution participants include China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) and Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC).

Participants also submitted a proof of concept demo proposal to ETSI NFV called “Mapping ETSI-NFV onto Multi-Vendor, Multi-Domain Transport SDN”.

A technical white paper on the demonstration is available to download.

http://www.oiforum.com/meetings-and-events/2016-oif-sdn-t-api-demo/