Arpit Joshipura | 27 September 2018
As operators continue to experience growing demands on their networks in the lead up to 5G, the need for high-bandwidth, flat, and super high-speed Optical Transport Networks (OTNs) is greater than ever. Combined with an increasingly global market, there is a clear need for service providers to work across international boundaries and provide end-to-end services for their customers that is carrier and geographic-agnostic.
Enter the Cross-domain, Cross-layer VPN (CCVPN) use case, coming with the next ONAP release, Casablanca (due in late 2018). Piloted by Linux Foundation Platinum members China Mobile, Vodafone and Huawei — with contributions from a handful of other vendors — in response to evolving market needs, CCVPN enables code that will allow ONAP to automate and orchestrate cloud-enabled, software-defined VPN services across network operator borders. This means that operators will be able to provision a VPN service that cross international borders by accessing and orchestrating resources on other carrier networks.
The use case was demonstrated on-stage at Open Networking Summit Europe and includes two ONAP instances: one deployed by China Mobile and one deployed by Vodafone. Both instances orchestrate the respective operator underlay OTNs networks, overlay SD-WAN networks and leverage each others networks for for cross-operator VPN service delivery.
In addition to provisioning cross-domain, cross-layer VPN, this effort represents true collaboration to solve industry challenges. By combining forces, developers from different companies are continuing to work together and with the community to refine features to fully enable CCVPN as part of the Casablanca release. To learn more about ONAP, please visit www.onap.org; more details on the CCVPN project are available on the project Wiki page here. Blog posts from Huawei and Vodafone are also available for additional information.