ETSI NFV and MEC IOP Plugtests Report 2021 published

Sophia Antipolis, 26 November 2021

In the context of the NFV Plugtests Programme and in order to accelerate NFV and MEC adoption and interoperability, ETSI organized the NFV&MEC IOP Plugtests 2021 event from 1 to 15 October 2021. The Report of this multi-vendor interoperability (IOP) event, held remotely, is now publicly available for download. NFV and MEC overall interoperability reached a 95% to 100% success rate.

The NFV&MEC Plugtests offered NFV and MEC solution providers and open-source projects an opportunity to meet on-line and assess the level of interoperability of their NFV and MEC solutions, while validating their implementation of the latest NFV and MEC specifications and APIs.

A total of 29 organizations and over 75 engineers were involved in the preparation of this 2 weeks event forming an engaged and diverse community of implementers testing together over 25 NFV and MEC solutions, such as Virtual and Containerized Network Functions (VNFs), Management and Orchestration solutions, NFV Infrastructure, as well as MEC Platforms, Systems and Applications.

As in previous events, different participating organizations and Functions Under Test (FUTs) were able to interact remotely through the NFV HIVE (Hub for Interoperability and Validation at ETSI) which provides a secure framework to interconnect participants’ labs and implementations and is a key element for an efficient Plugtests preparation and successful events.

The main highlights of this NFV&MEC Plugtests include:

  • The remarkable progress in MEC Interoperability Testing, where for the first-time orchestration was included in the test configurations. The test plan for MEC interoperability has been significantly extended with regards to previous events and it is being contributed to ETSI MEC ISG as input for the MEC Interoperability Test Specification.
  • The consolidation of the Test Automation Platform for MEC and NFV API Conformance Testing. The platform benefits now from a reliable CI/CD pipeline allowing to make the fixes in the Test Suites available to Plugtests participants in the matter of minutes.

Once again, the test sessions allowed to identify, discuss, and fix a number of potential issues and to provide valuable feedback and new input to ETSI NFV and MEC ISGs. The Report is available HERE.