The Broadband Forum announced at its second quarter meeting in Taipei significant progress on five projects relating to the realisation and implementation of Cloud Central Office (CloudCO), which is scheduled to be launched later in the year, with preparations to test the implementations under way at the first Open Broadband Lab in Asia, which was announced recently.
The Broadband Forum's CloudCO projects encompass architecture and hardware, as well as software implementation and migration, and represent one of the first use cases for the recently launched Open Broadband initiative designed to provide a new platform for the integration and testing of broadband-related services.
The forum is also focusing on key use cases for 5G networking, including hybrid wireless wireline networking in access and home networking, network slicing and projects for backhaul and fronthaul transport.
Additionally, further aspects of the forum's Broadband 20/20 vision include the evolution of TR-069 into a user services platform for premises' networks and compute resources, for example entertainment and the Internet of Things (IoT), which are scheduled to be released later this year.
During the second quarter meeting a number of specifications were approved, including TR-390, which defines standardised mechanisms for performance measurement and is designed to enable service providers to gain greater insight into how the access network is performing.
Unveiled in August last year, the CloudCO projects aim to enable functionality that can be accessed via a northbound API and cover:
1. Definition of a reference architectural framework for the CloudCO specifying the behaviour of functional modules.
2. Definition of interfaces (potentially including APIs, Yang or other schemas and protocols) between the functional modules.
3. A software reference implementation of the framework to allow code to be upstreamed to open source organisations in the future, plus enable VNF vendors to test functions on the reference implementation.
4. A project on CloudCO coexistence with, and subscriber migration from, legacy broadband architectures, such as TR-178-style architectures.
5. A project to deliver a hardware reference implementation of CloudCO based on deployment considerations.
