China Mobile, Vodafone and Huawei have jointly demonstrated cross-operator VPN service orchestration using the Linux Foundation's Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).
The three companies – all platinum members of the ONAP project, made use of the cross-domain, cross-layer VPN capabilities set to be introduced in the upcoming ONAP Casablanca.
The demonstration made use of two ONAP instances – one deployed by Vodafone, and the other deployed by China Mobile – which both orchestrate the respective operator underlay OTN networks and overlay SD-WAN networks while peer to each other for cross-operator VPN service delivery.
The partners have agreed to collaborate on the development of additional features required for cross-domain, cross-layer use cases and add the resulting work to ONAP Casablanca, which is due to be released in November.
“This is the next big investment to the community, after we successfully validated VoLTE with ONAP Amsterdam, and launched commercial product development based on ONAP Beijing,” China Mobile chief scientist and general manager for its AI and Intelligent Operation R&D Center Jun-Lan Feng said.
“Starting from China Mobile's deployment requirement for Enterprise customer-oriented optical/IP VPN services, with the joint vision that ONAP should serve as the general platform to enable automation and intelligence both within and across SP boundaries, the new CCVPN use case demonstrates the attempt of using ONAP to achieve the cross-technical domain (SDN/ NFV), cross-layer (SOTN and SDWAN) and cross-boundary (between the two operators) service provision and automation.”