On February 20th ~ 23rd 2024, the ETSI ISG F5G #17th Plenary meeting was held in Sophia Antipolis, France. This is the first plenary meeting of the ISG F5G third term.

In the meeting, the election of F5G Chair and Vice-Chairs for the third term was held. Dr. Olivier Ferveur from POST Luxembourg was appointed the ISG F5G Chair effective immediately. Dr. Marcus Brunner from Huawei Technologies (UK) Co., Ltd. and Dr. Jialiang Jin from China Telecom were appointed the Vice-Chairs (the mandates of F5G Vice-Chairs will start on 17th April 2024).


NFV#44

2024-02-14 Posted by Yuya Kuno, NFV SOL Vice-Chair 250 Hits

As in recent plenary meetings, the agenda during the week was fully packed between regular plenary sessions, WG meetings and other more industry-driven events. Regarding the later, it is worth highlighting the following couple of events. Firstly, the 3rd Telco Cloud Roundtable, which took place on Monday afternoon, and gathered regular ETSI NFV meeting delegates with delegates from the industry, like network operators, academia, and open source community. Representing network operators, we had the pleasure to welcome Hajime Miyamoto (KDDI), Hiroki Baba (NTT), Jian Xu (China Mobile), Yusuke Takano (Softbank) and Tatsuya Toyama (Rakuten Mobile); from academia, professor Dr. Yuji Sekiya of University of Tokyo, and from the open source community, Ranny Haiby, CTO of The Linux Foundation.

Feedback from network operator's development and network integration using NFV technologies, as well as more forward looking perspectives of NFV technologies were nicely shared and discussed during the roundtable. More information about the roundtable is available in this other [blogpost of roundtable].

Secondly, a dedicated workshop between ETSI NFV and LFN's Nephio project was also held on Wednesday, to seek the potential collaboration points between both standards and opensource. The workshop was very timely considering the activities of both organizations in areas like automation, support for virtualization of RAN and Telco Cloud platform services. ETSI NFV is looking forward to collaborating with opensource communities to bring further alignment between standards and opensource for the benefit of the whole telecom industry.

NFV 44 Plenary session

Figure 2: Plenary session during NFV#44

On the more technical side, the ISG confirmed transferring the major focus of work from Release 4 to both Release 5 and Release 6. Publication ed451 is declared to be the final version of Release 4 in terms of feature development, and ed461 is expected to be only bugfix. Closing Release 4 will free up more resources to develop and keep on track the Release 5 normative work and Release 6 informative work.



Sophia Antipolis, 07 February 2024

On December 11, the third Cloud Native Roundtable was held as a special session of the 44th ETSI NFV Plenary Meeting in Tokyo Japan. This time, the roundtable mainly focuses on sharing the experience and research achievements of the Asian operators.

NFV 44 Roundtable 1

Four prominent engineers leading the commercial development of network virtualization for major Japanese operators (KDDI, Softbank, Rakuten Mobile, and NTT DOCOMO) were invited to share the current development status, challenges of the Telco cloud and expectations for future network virtualization concepts and standardization. Researchers from University of Tokyo, NTT, and China Mobile were invited to present their view on the further evolution of mobile network architecture and network virtualization technologies. Besides these, the CTO of Linux Foundation Networking was invited to this roundtable as well to give a keynote speech on open-source activities for network virtualization and how could open source and ETSI NFV can further collaborate.

Ranny Haiby, CTO of Linux Foundation Networking (LFN), gave an overview of the activities of ONAP, Nephio and ODIM, which are representative open source projects for network virtualization under the LFN umbrella. He also highlighted the importance of cooperation between these projects and standardization, and made a proposal for strengthening cooperation with ETSI NFV in the future. Ranny said that key to successful collaboration is having individuals active in both open-source projects and standardization with acknowledgement on the differences between the two. He also mentioned the importance of face-to-face collaboration and encourage more activities to be held in the future.



Hi MEC community!! Long-time-no-write!

Last MEC plenary in December 2023 in Dubai was simply amazing, also coupled with a great "Standardization Day: ETSI meets UAE".

Here, I had the pleasure to talk, together with other speakers from the industry and also the ETSI Director General. During the MEC plenary, among the other things, we have discussed our collaborations with open-source (e.g. CAMARA) and industry groups, and also continued the definition of MEC Phase 4 (2024-2026) and its role in future systems.

In general, I'm pleased to say that I've also seen a great joint effort and fantastic collaboration among all the delegates, to finally converge with all the outstanding work from Phase 3.

Now, I am just writing you this quick blog post, to let you know that the group is finally about to close, with many great achievements, our MEC Phase 3 work!

So, stay tuned for the forthcoming publications of our deliverables and join us at MEC#37 meeting in Cupertino (USA), 18-22 March 2024!



On January 23rd 2024, an ETSI webinar "How can all-optical networks contribute to carbon transition?", was presented by ETSI ISG F5G, to disseminate the ETSI White Paper "All-optical network facilitates the Carbon Shift" published in November 2023.

Green all optical network

This White Paper was developed by ISG F5G to provides an overview of an all-optical network and the recent developments in optical technologies, and highlights the role of all-optical networks as a key ICT enabler to meet the UN sustainability goals.

In this webinar, there were four speakers, that included the co-editors / contributors of the White Paper, who shared their viewpoints on green all-optical networks:

  • Mr. Jean-Luc Lemmens, Co-Editor, CEO IDATE
  • Dr. Olivier Ferveur, F5G Acting-Chair ISG F5G, Post Luxembourg
  • Dr. Xiangkun Man, Co-Editor, China Unicom
  • Dr. Marcus Brunner, Liaison Officer in ISG F5G, Huawei


Sophia Antipolis, 29 January 2024

The ETSI Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualization (ISG NFV) has just published its specifications of version 4.5.1 (except for NFV006, which is to be published separately). In this version, container-related functionalities have been completed (such as the support for container cluster management), and new features have been added, both in stage 2 and stage 3 (such as flexible VNF deployment, certificate management and fault management model). Version 4.5.1 is the final for NFV Release 4 and version 4.6.1 is only maintenance.

The enhancements of the architecture enable the NFV framework to support Certificate Management Function (CMF) and Intent Management (IM). Certificate Management strengthens the security of both communication between VNFs and communication between NFV-MANOs internally, and enables certificate verification in multi-vendor environment. Intent Management helps NFV-MANO to support intent based management interfaces between the NFVO and its consumers.

In addition, stage 2 version 4.5.1 specifications include support to Fault Management model to unify alarms type, interface between CIS Cluster Management (CCM) and Virtualised Infrastructure Manager (VIM), and the new Flexible VNF deployment feature.

The stage 3 specifications related to the support for containerized workloads have been enhanced e.g.: to strengthen security and to provide guidance via MANO procedures. The new stage 3 CIS Cluster Management (CCM) specification, enhancement of existing interfaces to support Certificate Management, and new Flexible VNF deployment feature are part of this version.



The ENI#28 meeting was online and took place on 11-14 December 2023.

  • 25 ISG members present.
  • 122 documents were handled and more may come in with some email approval.

The ETSI ENI Industry Specification Group was created in February 2017, today members come from operators, vendors and research institutes all over the world.

The meeting was productive and achieved progress. A deliverable ENI 035 was published during ENI#28, early Release 4, four deliverables were agreed as stable, two more are expected to be stable in January 2024:

  • GR ENI 035 Categorization or AI for IP networks was published 14th December 2023 as Release 4.

With the publication of the report (ETSI GR ENI 035) specifically defining the evaluation criteria for the determination of the Autonomicity level in the domain of the IP network, it has been possible to obtain measurable criteria to score actual benchmarks. The work is foreseen to be expanded to other domains in the coming year, possibly involving domains like Datacentre.

  • GR ENI 010 Evaluation of categories for AI application to Networks was declared stable as release 4.
  • GR ENI 017 Overview of Prominent Control Loop Architectures was declared stable as release 4.
  • GS ENI 030 Transformer Architecture for Policy Translation was declared stable as release 4.
  • GR ENI 031 Construction and application of fault maintenance network knowledge graphs was declared stable as release 4.
  • GR ENI 015 Processing and Management of Intent Policy is expected to be stable in early 2024.
  • GR ENI 032 In-situ Flow Information Telemetry (IFIT) Deployment Scenarios is expected to be stable in early 2024.


On November 30th 2023, an important ETSI ISG F5G Group Report was released. The title of the report is “Fifth Generation Fixed Network (F5G); F5G Advanced Generation Definition” [ETSI GR F5G 021]. This is the first report for the F5G Advanced generation in Release 3. The publication of the ETSI GR F5G 021 is a significant milestone for ISG F5G, which is steadily evolving from F5G to F5G Advanced.

Six dimensions of F5G Small

Six dimensions of F5G Advanced with enabling technologies characteristics



The ISG THz third and fourth face to face meetings were held in Germany. After meeting in Braunschweig, the residence of “Henry the Lion”, a medieval Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, the second meeting was held in Munich, which was found by him.

Between the 27th to the 29th of September 2023 the meeting took place at Technische Universität Braunschweig – the oldest University of Technology in Germany. The meeting which was hosted by the Institute of Communications Technology and attended by 36 participants representing academia, and industry both in person (10) and online (26).

Picture1 

Impressions of Braunschweig Burgplatz
(Source: Braunschweig Stadtmarketing GmbH / Steffen und Bach GmbH)

Thomas Kürner, Meeting host and ETSI ISG THz Chair, started the meeting by introducing Braunschweig, TU Braunschweig and the institute to the attendees. This introduction provided some information about a selection Braunschweig’s historic persons including Carl-Friedrich Gauß, who was a student at TU Braunschweig.



The ETSI NFV community met September, 18th-22nd 2023 in Copenhagen, which has been a change after several meetings in ETSI headquarters. NFV#43 was hosted by Huawei and we had a wonderful location at the Royal Golf Club which was just next door to the DTW23 conference of TM Forum, which allowed some delegates to participate in both meetings. ETSI NFV organized a telco cloud executive round table on Monday afternoon, with delegates coming from analysts, global operators, vendors and hyper-scalers discussing NFV topics.  For information on this round table, see our blog post at https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/blogs/technologies/entry/etsi-nfv-telco-cloud-native-executive-roundtable-at-nfv-43-plenary .

The NFV technical discussions covered topics from three releases. First studies on Release 6 topics have already been kicked off, Release 5 started normative work with the planning, and the feature work of Release 4 was finalized.

In more detail, during the opening plenary on September18th, latest achievements and background information were shared, including the planned schedule for the new releases.



(September 18th, 2023 Copenhagen)

On September 18th, during the NFV#43 plenary meeting, executive leadership members and technical experts from major operators, telco vendors and cloud providers were gathered together to share their companies experience on building the Telco cloud, to discuss the future of this concept, to provide their perspective on how NFV standards could help and/or how they should evolve in this context.

The roundtable started with ETSI ISG Network Function Virtualization (NFV) chair, Yoshihiro Nakajima’s opening speech. Yoshihiro introduced that during the past 10 years, ETSI NFV has provided 100+ specifications and 10000+ contributions, which help 90% of the operators worldwide to successfully move their business onto a modernized, virtualized cloud environment. Recently, ETSI NFV has continued to provide solutions on new key areas including Containerized NF (CNF), green NFV, physical infrastructure management and NFV Service Based Architecture (SBA). Especially for containerized NF support, NFV has published a set of new specifications defining the requirements and solutions for lifecycle management of CNFs, templates, interfaces of Container as a Service (CaaS) and container cluster management.



The emerging drone industry is undergoing significant growth and innovation. It provides services to a wide range of industries and applications, including security, safety and defense, disaster response, precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, measurement and inspection in constructions, shipping logistics, land surveying and mapping, aerial photography and video, etc. The variety of applications for drones is expected to expand.

The drone industry is leveraging continued advances in technology, including improved battery life, better obstacle avoidance systems, enhanced camera capabilities, specialized sensors, communications and the integration of artificial intelligence for autonomous flight and data analysis.

The integration of 5G technology with drones opens up new possibilities and revolutionizes the capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in terms of connectivity, remote operation, and collaboration between drones (drone swarms), etc. Furthermore, the 5G edge brings significant value to the drone industry by enabling low latency and reliability, providing scalable and efficient processing capabilities of data from their onboard sensors and camaras, ensuring data privacy and security and improving autonomy in drones that allows them to make faster and more intelligent decisions locally – without relying on continuous communication with a central server. This is particularly essential for critical real-time decisions required, for example, for safety applications. It also allows drones to react faster to changing environmental conditions and unexpected events. For example, they can adjust their flight paths, avoid obstacles or change their mission parameters in real time.




The ISG THz second face to face meeting was held between the 20th to the 23rd of June, 2023, in the historic city of Durham, famous for its Cathedral and Castle which accommodates some of the lucky undergraduate students. The meeting which was hosted by the department of Engineering at Durham University was attended by 35 participants representing academia, and industry both in person and online from across six European countries and several participants from China. We had relatively pleasant weather unlike the heavy rain that followed in July.

THz 2ndf2f3         



On June 29th during MWC Shanghai 2023, ETSI ISG NFV organized a “Telco cloud-native roundtable” to present NFV work and engage participation from Asian operators who were invited. The goal was also to learn their experience, feedbacks and drive the evolution of the future telco cloud. The roundtable offered a valuable chance for synchronizing the latest progress and vision of the ETSI NFV standard community with the key telco operators in Asia-pacific area who attended the event.

NFVBlog Release5

ETSI ISG NFV Chair, Yoshihiro Nakajima, gave the opening speech and pointed out that Asia-Pacific is pioneering the 5G SA global implementation, with NFV telco cloud providing the much-needed foundation for such deployments. Therefore, this roundtable was targeted to hear the learnings of the operators within this area and their thoughts on the NFV future evolution for supporting 5G-Advanced and beyond business. He also highlighted the main characteristics of the NFV community, being built on openness and collaboration; characteristics that were fundamental pillars for its 10-years successful journey to create globally adopted standards in the industry.



Meeting at ETSI headquarters of Sophia Antipolis in May-June has been always wonderful with a lot happening (local festivals, fun and adventure activities) in and around Nice, Antibes, Grasse and Cannes. It can be a time to rejuvenate yourself in this perfect weather. Some of us were happy to spend the weekend due to Technical Steering Committee (TSC) workshop on 1st and 2nd of June 2023. This year as well, we were greeted with gorgeous weather and wonderful gathering of NFV delegates onsite for NFV#42 happened between 5th to 9th of June. People who couldn't travel were able to join remotely for this plenary as well continuing the hybrid meeting practices.

During the opening plenary on 5th June, Madalin Neag (part of ETSI Secretariat) presented the agenda for NFV#42 plenary meetings, working group sessions and proposal for special ISG sessions during that week. ETSI ISG NFV chair, Yoshihiro Nakajima-san presented to the ISG on the latest accomplishments of the group and introduced the background on the special ISG sessions in NFV#42 plenary meetings. The special sessions were reserved to discuss the collaboration with other SDOs and to collect new ideas on, how to efficiently steer future work in the NFV. Madalin presented the progress made since NFV#41. The TSC manager, Ulrich Kleber then presented detailed status of Releases 4, 5 and 6, including:

- 24 normative specifications were published for edition 4.4.1 in Release-4.
- 6 informative group reports were published in Release-5.

Diego Lopez, chair of NFV’s NOC (Network Operator Council), shared this group’s views on the future of ISG, the challenges with Versioning of the specifications, view on Convergence of network models and the analysis, prioritization of new features in Release 6. The details and insights shared were appreciated and appropriate actions were noted by the ISG to follow-up.



Hi MEC community!

I am back again with a quick blog post, as I simply wanted to attract your attention to a nice Industry Panel that I had the pleasure and honor to organize at the IEEE ICC 2023 conference. This panel was on “Telco Edge Cloud evolution toward Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)”, and I was there also with my role of Chairman of ETSI MEC, and inviting many speakers coming from various companies and industry organizations, and also representing various projects (e.g. GSMA and CAMARA, to mention a few).
In fact, as most of you well know, MEC is involved in a standardization activity (also in alignment with 3GPP) to put in place MEC Federation standards, also by considering the requirements from GSMA OPG (Operator Platform Group). The effort from the industry is also including open source and other business agreements, thus not only standards! 
That’s the reason for this great panel, i.e. bringing together various voices, also from partners, hyperscalers, and (why not!) also discuss legal implications for these multi-party collaborations. As we discussed at the panel, the ecosystem of NaaS stakeholders is thus quite huge and heterogeneous, including operators, edge service providers, cloud providers, vertical segments, SW companies, open-source and developers communities, etc… So, definitely, the common intention is to collaborate.
The final goal will be certainly to provide more value globally to MEC ecosystem and all end-users!  Enjoy the slides from the panel (here). 

Stay tuned also for any further news and updates on this topic, if you are interested! 



When ETSI ISG NFV met in Sophia Antipolis recently for their 41st plenary meeting, it was not only collocating the 10 year anniversary celebration (see separate blog post here) with a week full of technical discussions. It was also a major step to provide the next package of specifications in NFV’s Release 4. The new package contains edition 4.4.1 documents for both stage 2 and stage 3.

In stage 2, 14 documents were updated mainly with maintenance. In addition, 2 new group specifications were published:

ETSI GS NFV-IFA 048, which adopts the State-Task design pattern to specify the NFV-MANO policy information model. The information elements in the model are transferred through policy management interfaces over NFV-MANO reference points, which enable the enforcement of policies in the framework of NFV-MANO. Stack-Task design pattern supports representing different policy expression forms and provides more flexibility and extensibility in respects to policy.

ETSI GS NFV-IFA 047, which specifies the service requirements as well as service interfaces produced by the MDAF (Management Data Analytics Function). Following the recommendations from a previous Release 4 group report ETSI GR NFV-IFA 041 on enabling autonomous management in NFV-MANO, this specification specifies a new function named MDAF (equipped with AI/ML models) and its service interfaces, which improve decision making of NFV-MANO in automation processes especially for network service management and orchestration.  

In stage 3, there were 10 updated documents. The major highlights are described below:

ETSI GS NFV-SOL 018 - Profiling specification of protocol and data model solutions for OS Container management and orchestration:

The biggest part of the updates was about Cloud-Native VNFs and Container Infrastructure management. After the big leap forward in the support of containerized workloads in the NFV framework, which the previous edition 4.3.1 represented, the recently published 4.4.1 edition has brought additional support and consolidation of the feature.



The weather in Munich in late April was still a bit cold, but it did not prevent the ETSI NFV’s IFA working group (WG) from gathering in an interim face-to-face meeting under the warm hospitality of DOCOMO Euro-Labs. IFA WG is mainly responsible for delivering NFV stage 2 related specifications, including NFV architecture, interfaces and information model design, as well as informative work study on any new architectural related use cases exploring the evolution of NFV. This WG’s mission makes IFA an important WG within the ISG NFV, with always constant workload and substantial high-intense discussions. 

The proposal for an interim IFA meeting was made during the NFV#41 plenary meeting, held in March this year, in order to address the amount of work to be completed by the WG by this summer. The proposal was endorsed by the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and the ISG, as a whole. The interim WG meeting targeted to speed up the progress of active work items which are part of Release 4 and 5 and promote many of the work items to catch up with the upcoming summer release drop delivery timeline. 

This interim meeting restarted the practice of past interim WG F2F meetings in ETSI NFV after 3 years’ hiatus due to the worldwide epidemic of COVID-19. The last memories of these interim meetings were from 2019, when IFA and SOL WGs jointly held interim meetings in Munich (same city, but with different hosting company) in March 2019. We would like to thank DOCOMO Euro-Labs for kindly hosting the interim WG meeting this time. Seven WG colleagues participated to the meeting on site and a dozen of other colleagues attended remotely.

IMG 0436 edited IFA332 group entrance 



Augmented Reality (AR) mixes in real-time spatially registered digital content with the experience of the real world. The Industry Specification Group on Augmented Reality Framework (ISG ARF) is defining a framework for the interoperability of AR components, systems, services, focus on advancing the adoption of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in industrial applications.

The ARF Industrial Group is made up of representatives from companies in various industries, including automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing. The group aims to promote the use of AR and VR in industrial settings by specifying functional requirements, developing technical specifications, and promoting awareness of the benefits of these technologies.



In early March, ETSI’s ISG NFV gathered again in ETSI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis. This 41st plenary meeting was collocated with a special event celebrating the 10 years anniversary of this very important Industry Specification Group adding together again many NFV friends from all around the world. (More details of NFV 10th anniversary can be found in the next post: https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/news/2204-etsi-s-conference-for-nfv-10th-anniversary-looks-to-the-future).

 Tweeter 540x308 nfv41The NFV#41 opening plenary was held at the very beginning of the week. ETSI ISG NFV chair Yoshihiro Nakajima started by highlighting the achievements from the NFV#40 - ETSI ISG NFV continues to deliver with very good pace. As well, he took advantage to briefly announce the 10th anniversary event -a good opportunity to not only celebrate the accomplishments that NFV has made in the past 10 years, but also to look forward to the future.

The TSC manager, Ulrich Kleber presented in depth the description of Releases 4 and 5, but also an overview of the Release 6. The updated schedule for those releases was detailed showing our group’s intention to speed up the standards’ creation process and alignment with the industry fast progress in this area.

Diego Lopez, NFV NOC’s chair, started his speech by talking about the recently-published NOC's white paper. He continued by sharing recent operators’ considerations on the relationship between ETSI standards and other cloud-related standards and specifications. Some proposals for future actions were triggered for the ISG including a more direct and dynamic interaction with open-source projects and convergence of K8s and NFV network models.



First “post-kickoff” plenary of ISG THz

Mate Boban, ISG THz Vice Chair

ISG THz has had its first “post-kickoff” plenary on Feb 8-10, 2023. Pleasant sunny weather and occasional surprising wind gusts have greeted us in ETSI HQ in Sophia Antipolis; overall, a welcome weather change for most participants hailing from the northern European locations, myself included.



2022:  major strides marked on the network automation transformation journey

Nurit Sprecher, ISG ZSM Vice Chair

Another exciting year in the AI/ML-powered network automation transformation journey is beginning during which the ETSI ZSM (Zero-touch network and Service Management) group will build on the significant achievements of 2022 – in the context of published specifications/reports, cooperation with SDOs, POCs (Proof of Concept) and the strong momentum created in the industry.



The ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) NFV has published the report ETSI GR NFV-IFA 039 titled " Report on Service Based Architecture (SBA) design ". This document is the first deliverable for the NFV Release 5 feature on “Service based architecture”.

Service based architecture (SBA) is an architectural style that places emphasis on the services provided by individual architectural components. Services are accessible over service interfaces, and are offered by service producers and consumed by service consumers. ETSI GR NFV-IFA 039 provides a feasibility study on the application of SBA design style to the NFV-MANO architectural framework specified in ETSI GS NFV 006. This includes - but is not limited to - studying aspects such as making interfaces independent from reference points, identifying new functionality related to NFV services like service registration or applying generalization for some services.



During early winter season, friends from ETSI ISG NFV gathered again at the beautiful riverside of the Thames, to promote the progress of the current active work items and meanwhile, standing at the milestone of 10 years’ point of time, foresee the next decade’s evolution of NFV with Release 6 planning. This meeting hosted by Huawei, was co-located with Layer123 World Congress 2022, which was held in the same building, Queen Elizabeth II Centre from December 5th to 7th. It was a great pleasure to see many familiar old faces who had deeply contributed to ETSI ISG NFV standards.

NFV 40 04

It was still a very busy and fruitful F2F meeting week with about 50 people’s participation on site. Both the number of delegates and contributions increased steadily from the previous NFV#39 meeting. During the 3 months since NFV#39 meeting, 1 stage 2 ed441 New WID and 1 super WID including 12 stage 3 ed441 specifications were approved, 29 final drafts including stage 2 and stage 3 ed371 specifications were published, and 5 final drafts including NFV006ed441 on MANO Architectural Framework were in ISG approval via remote consensus process. Highlights of NFV#40 meeting include:

  • 5 New WID proposals were approved by the ISG:
    • NWI proposal for CIS Cluster Management stage 3
    • NWI on NFV-SOL018ed441 (reopening specification for profiling the service interfaces offered by Container Infrastructure Service Management (CISM))
    • Maintenance of NFV terminology (NFV003)
    • NWI for transforming release description to a group report
    • NWI proposal on CCM-VIM Interoperability Interface and Information Model Specification
  • Second round of feature proposal discussion on NFV Release 6
  • Attend ETSI prospects workshop in Layer123 event
  • Joint WG session to share information about Release 4 features tracking, OpenStack Tacker feedback and OAuth 2.0 scope


Hello folks, I have again to ask apologies for my not-very-frequent blog posts, but really this 2022 is (was) a dense and interesting year! A lot of nice developments and progresses from MEC, as the group is ramping up with Phase 3 work (BTW, stay tuned for the forthcoming announcements on many outstanding deliverables!). In the meantime, I just wanted to inform you that at the MEC#32 plenary the ISG has approved the updated publication in our MEC Leadership webpage (here) with the list of recently appointed LS Officers for the Vertical Industries. They can be our ambassadors, to support on the dialogue with various organizations: in fact, as we know MEC is serving multiple use cases and vertical industries, and ETSI ISG MEC has already established collaborations with a number of external organizations (e.g. automotive), and plans to increase the other domains (e.g. industrial automation, drones, CDN/videostreaming..). Here, I expect nice progresses from the dialogue with these verticals, also related to possible impacts on the Work Item MEC 043 about “Abstracted Radio Network Information for Industries” (the study item will study use cases, key issues and recommendations related to exposing abstracted radio network information for the industries).

Finally, I wanted to exploit the opportunity to wish you all a good Holiday break. Please take care, enjoy a deserved rest, and recharge your batteries, looking forward for a great 2023!



Blog MEC Nokia city

We at Nokia had the pleasure of taking advantage of the MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) global standardization conference that we hosted at our offices in Israel by organizing a unique exposure day on September 18, 2022 for Israeli technology companies which benefit or can benefit from operating in the 5G Edge Cloud ecosystem. To learn about the characteristics of the 5G edge cloud and the value it can create, see my blog on 5G Edge Computing.

To bring everyone up to speed, Shlomi Angi, our CTO of Nokia Israel, provided an informative introduction to 5G and edge cloud.

It was fascinating to hear from representatives of ELTA, Nexar, Eye-Net, Autotalks, Continual, Sensorz, Mov.ai, Onelayer, Qwilt, InceptionXR and Dataloop about innovative services and solutions that they offer in diverse fields.

 



Industry Specification Group (ISG) IPv6 Enhanced innovation (IPE) held its 8th plenary on 6 and 7 September 2022.

The ISG continues to gain momentum in the IP industry, bypassing the 100 supporters including 23 operators, interested in sharing their experiences and defining the future strategies.

Leveraging on the published Group Reports and aiming to stimulate further evolutions, two PoC proposals were adopted:

  • "SRv6 based 5G Non-Terrestrial Network to provide services with granted SLA, like V2X communication” by CNR-ISTI
  • “Demonstration of deterministic networking in the Industrial Internet scenario” by China Telecom

6 presentations were given at IPE#08:

Veronica Mckillop, (UK IPv6 Council and guest to ISG#08), presented the UK IPv6 Council history and values.

Blog IPE 8 UK IPv6 



Over 50 delegates participated to this 39th meeting of ISG NFV which took place under the beautiful blue skies and very refreshing weather in the south of France. Although some of us were still unable to travel due to constraints caused by COVID-19. The face-to-face meetings resumed at the 39th ISG meeting, and I am very happy to be back and able to meet with you face-to-face in the ETSI building.NFV 39 blog ETSI parking

The standardization discussions in each working group during the meeting week were very efficient and steady, taking full advantage of the face-to-face discussions. The number of contributions has increased since the last meeting due to the situation where the confusion by COVID-19 is calming down. Thanks to the standardization delegates for their hard work! Four new Work Items and 22 final drafts were approved and published between the previous meeting and the 39th meeting.



2 ETSI webinars ‘IPv6 Enhanced Innovation Global Vision’ and ‘Major Industry Scenarios’ took place on September 1st and 2nd respectively. Experts from government institutions, operators, manufacturers and research institutes, shared their vision and the progress made to date within ETSI ISG (Industry Specification Group) IPE (IPv6 Enhanced innovation).

IPE Webinars 2022 blog 1

See Webinar Part 1 and Webinar Part 2.



Industry Specification Group (ISG) IPv6 Enhanced innovation (IPE) held its 7th plenary on 28 June 2022.

The current focus of the ISG is twofold: to publish best practices guidelines, to provide and demonstrate PoCs / test case descriptions to support innovation on IPv6 networking topics and validate standards-based approaches, whilst working on “IPv6 networking e2e reference architecture" spanning multiple IETF areas and defined protocols.

ISG IPE is steadily growing its membership passing 100 to become one of the largest ETSI ISGs in terms of members/participants. Many operators including AirLAN, Entel Chile, Megacable Holdings, Personal Paraguay, Sky Italia, Swisscom and Totalplay Comunicaciones recently joined, reaching 23 global operators involved. This testifies the need for operators to define IP transport strategy and confront within the industry on evolution guidelines.



The COVID-19 pandemic stopped ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) face-to-face meetings for more than two years. As a result, the ISG blog posts for the plenary sessions were interrupted as well. Although people have been used to regarding online meetings as normal in the past two years, it is time now to call people back to face-to-face meetings with the gradual relaxation of epidemic prevention policies in many countries.

This time, the ETSI ISG NFV met again at NFV#38 from May 30th to June 3rd 2022, in Sophia Antipolis, France. The meeting took a hybrid format, ETSI headquarters hosted 23 delegates from Europe, Asia and North America. Many other delegates participated in the meeting remotely due to their inability to travel. This is the first time that ETSI NFV has returned to a face-to-face meeting after the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020.



ETSI has published a new IPv6 Enhanced innovation (IPE) Group Report (GR) “5G Transport over IPv6 and SRv6” (ETSI GR IPE 005). A joint effort by Post Luxembourg, China Telecom, Globe Telecom, the University of Luxembourg and Huawei, this report discusses the role of networking technologies including Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and Segment Routing version 6 (SRv6) in supporting the current and future requirements of 5G networks and applications: 

https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gr/IPE/001_099/005/01.01.01_60/gr_ipe005v010101p.pdf.

As 5G networks are deployed worldwide, new services appear and new requirements on the packet transport and backhaul networks arise. Current network architectures may still support the initial demand posed by 5G, yet it is fundamental to make packet networks ready to address the requirements of the coming services. Applications such as Massive Machine Type Communications (MMTC), Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) and distributed Cloud services will push the demand well beyond the present capabilities.



The EUROPEAN COMMISSION (EC) has sent a first draft of a standardization request (SR) to the European Standardization Organizations in support of safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) should be a tool for people and be a force for good in society with the ultimate aim of increasing human well-being. ETSI and CEN, CENELEC have indicated that the work covered by the request falls within their area of competence.

In ETSI, OCG AI will co-ordinate comments on the SR AI while the resulting technical work will be performed in the appropriate technical committees. At this stage, the European Commission does not expect ESOs to develop Harmonised Standards, since the AI Act is not yet adopted by the European Parliament and Council, but the work can contribute later to such necessary Harmonised Standards.



The ENI#21 meeting was online only as many countries were returning and still affected by travel restrictions or delegates not allowed to travel, and took place on 7-10 March 2022.

  • 20 Industry Specification Group (ISG) members present
  • 82 documents were handled

Let’s remind that the ISG is open to ETSI members and non-ETSI members alike. The different players in the value chain are welcome to join the ISG effort, contribute to the development of these key specifications and demonstrate Proofs of Concepts (PoCs). To join, please contact: isgsupport@etsi.org

The ETSI ENI Industry Specification Group was created in February 2017, today members come from operators, vendors and research institutes all over the world.

The meeting was productive and achieved progress. The report ETSI GR ENI 012 Reactive In-situ Flow Information Telemetry was published during ENI#21.

An open area is approved, where all stable drafts and previously published deliverables are available.



Hello again, and sorry for not writing so frequently. A lot of things happened in these busy months!

ISG MEC have updated some key Phase 2 specifications, and it is continuously progressing on the current Phase 3 work. I can only say “kudos” to the rapporteurs and actual leaders of this tremendous amount of work (you can find more information in the recent ETSI press release, and also details in this pdfshort summary.


ENI Release 2

2021-12-15 Posted by Dr Ray Forbes, ETSI ISG ENI Chair 1478 Hits

ENI focuses on improving the operator experience, adding closed-loop AI mechanisms based on context-aware, metadata-driven policies to more quickly recognize and incorporate new and changed knowledge, and hence, make actionable decisions.

ENI has specified a set of use cases and the derived requirements for a generic technology independent architecture of a network supervisory assistant system based on the ‘observe-orient-decide-act’ control loop model. This model gives recommendations to decision-making systems, such as network control and management systems, to adjust services and resources offered based on changes in user needs, environmental conditions and business goals.

Release 2 has specified enhanced use cases, requirements, system architecture, and Proof of Concept (PoC) specifications.



On 16 November ETSI ISG IPE held its 11th online Rapporteur call with about 30 participants, including delegates from EDF, Cisco, HPE, Huawei, Verizon, China Telecom attending the meeting.

Cédric Lavenu, Expert Research Engineer at EDF (Electricité de France) and Chair of the G3-PLC Alliance Technical Working Group, shared experience with the deployment of the G3-PLC technology, which is designed to natively support IPv6.

In 2011, French DSO (Distribution System Operator) Enedis started its smart grid project with IPv6-based G3-PLC (Power Line Communication) smart meters, called “Linky”. In late 2021, the Linky deployment is almost complete and consists of nearly 35 million smart meters deployed in the low voltage grid, behind one of the 740.000 medium voltage to low voltage transformer substations. This makes Enedis one of the largest IPv6 operators in the world.



A lot of time has passed since my last blog post, sorry for not reaching out to you, folks! Very busy period. Also, a lot of nice things are happening, and ISG MEC is continuously growing in membership, attracting new companies that are actively contributing to the standardization.

Our collaboration with 5GAA (now joining MEC!) is also well established with the identification of two MEC observers, Maxime Flament (CTO, 5GAA) and Luca Boni (Stellantis) who are acting as 5GAA representatives in MEC. The collaboration with Akraino is now also moving forward with the guidance of Jane Shen (Mavenir, Akraino TSC member and ETSI MEC Technical Expert) and Oleg Berzin (Equinix, Akraino TSC Co-Chair and PCEI PTL). Finally, we’ve recently held the 2021 edition of the MEC Hackathon (see results here, published as part of our renewed MEC Wiki page, https://mecwiki.etsi.org/).The MEC Sandbox is continuously updated with new functionalities, also used for the MEC Hackathon.



ENI#19 meeting has taken place from 6 to 9 September 2021 and has been performed online because many countries were still affected by travel restrictions or delegates were not allowed to travel. In terms of most relevant figures that denote the heavy work carried out during the meeting, it should be taken into account that:

  • 25 ISG members were present, and
  • 96 documents were handled.

Let’s remind that the Industry Specification Group (ISG) is open to ETSI members and non-ETSI members alike. The different players in the value chain are welcome to join the ISG effort, contribute to the development of key specifications and demonstrate Proofs of Concepts (PoCs). To join, please contact: isgsupport@etsi.org.

The ETSI ISG was created in February 2017 and today members come from operators, vendors and research institutes all over the world.

Highlights of the meeting

The meeting was productive and progress was achieved in different areas. Deliverable GR ENI 012 on “Reactive In-situ Flow Information Telemetry” was reviewed and declared as stable and it will now proceed to ISG review and approval. It was also decided to re-open the Work Items for the Use cases GS ENI 001 V3.2.1 in release 3 as well as Requirements GS ENI 002 V3.2.1 in Release 3.

GS ENI 005 V2.1.1 on “System Architecture” (Release 2) has completed the Remote Consensus and will be published soon.

The Terminology report GR ENI 004 V2.2.1 is in Remote Consensus until 29 September 2021, after which it is expected to be ratified and published.

An open area where all stable drafts and previously published deliverables are available, was approved.



Zero-touch network and service automation are essential to unleash the business potential of 5G and beyond. The ultimate automation target is a largely autonomous operation driven by high-level policies and rules, enabling self-configuration, self-monitoring, self-healing and self-optimization – without further human intervention. 

Automation is not only about technology; it also requires changes in the mindset of people. Trust is a major barrier to adoption and striving to build it requires a continuous learning process. As more automation processes are deployed and operate safely and efficiently, human trust will increase and the requirement for a level of supervision/intervention will diminish. Having native security (e.g. an adaptive secured framework, access control, trustworthiness, data protection) can help to establish confidence and instill trust as the automated processes deliver the intended business outcomes.

The threat surface in the ZSM environment is extensive, firstly due to the openness of the ZSM framework. The framework is modular, extensible and service-based and expands across multiple domains. Its interfaces are open and offer model-driven services. Protecting the interfaces and the management services within and across the domains is essential to ensure the trustworthiness of the ZSM framework. 

In addition, the ZSM services can be produced and consumed by new players coming from diverse industries (e.g. government, vehicle industry, energy, transport, etc.). Each player may require or support different trust levels according to its own deployment/execution environments, security policies and regulations. This variety demands flexible and adaptive security control.  



On July 12, ETSI ISG IPE held its 3rd online plenary. Close to 40 participants, including delegates from Cisco, Huawei, Verizon, China Telecom, ARCEP (France), Ofcom (UK), registered for the meeting.

During the Workshop ok IPv6 policy, ARCEP, Ofcom, Verizon and China Telecom introduced the latest IPv6 policies of France, UK, USA and China separately:



The ETSI ZSM end-to-end network slicing specification has been released.

Network slicing is expected to become a fundamental enabler for value generation: a $300 billion global revenue opportunity by 2025, according to the GSMA.
It has been designed to support a broad variety of use cases (including the unknown) with extreme requirements, providing tailored network capabilities for each individual service. But building a network that supports tens of thousands of individual slices – all of which can be created and set up, operated, scaled, assured to meet each slice’s service-level agreement (SLA), and torn down at a moment’s notice – presents several challenges.



The accelerated worldwide deployment of 5G networks poses a significant challenge to the way networks and services are created, orchestrated and managed. Full end-to-end automation becomes crucial for the delivery, dynamic adaptation and continuous assurance of the highly diverse services – each with its own broad range of requirements – while still ensuring economic sustainability. In addition, the network’s performance, coverage and capacity should be constantly assured to satisfy the requirements of the active services.



The ENI#18 meeting was online only as many countries were affected by travel restrictions or delegates not allowed to travel. It took place at 7-10 June 2021.

  • 26 ISG members all of which were present.
  • Operators: Telefonica, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, and Portugal Telecom.
  • 115 documents were handled.

Let’s remind that the ISG is open to ETSI members and non-ETSI members alike. The different players in the value chain are welcome to join the ISG effort, contribute to the development of these key specifications and demonstrate Proofs of Concepts (PoCs). To join, please contact: isgsupport@etsi.org

The ETSI ENI Industry Specification Group was created in Feb 2017, today members come from operators, vendors and research institutes all over the world.



Last March 2021, I’ve started my new journey in ETSI MEC, taking over the Chair position from my friend Alex Reznik (HPE). Sure, of course I’m not a “beginner” in this group (as most of you who know me can appreciate that I’m there in the MEC Leadership Team since the beginning of the Phase 1!). Nonetheless, given the great work done together in these amazing years in collaboration with all MEC stakeholders, I’m grateful of the trust of many companies who elected me and expressed their warm support in my new role.



Welcome to the ISG “IPv6 Enhanced innovation” (IPE) blog, keeping you updated on IPv6 enhanced innovation work ongoing at ETSI.

IPE blog 19052021

The ISG IPE Kick-off meeting took place in January 2021 with the creation of 5 initial Work Items and the appointment of a leadership team.



NFV blog052021

A virtual event on NFV Evolution organized by ETSI in partnership with Telecom TV and sponsored by Huawei was held from 19 to 21 April 2021.  The objective of the event was for the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) to get feedback from the industry on implementation experience with the ISG’s specifications and on future topics to be addressed in next specification releases. The event was also an opportunity for the participants to get updated on ETSI NFV’s activities, deliverables and future plans, as well as on the progress made in open source communities with regards to the convergence with the ISG’s standards. The event was held in parallel with the 34th meeting of the ISG. The choice was not accidental as this was the meeting where the ISG launched the process for collecting proposals from its members and participants on the features to be addressed within the scope of its next specification release (NFV Release 5).

The event programme featured six original presentations selected from the responses received to an open call, addressing deployment experience, new use cases and technical requirements:

  • Mr. Yuya Kuno, NTT DOCOMO, presented DOCOMO’s experience in developing and operating NFV and future expansion.
  • Mr. Pierre Lynch, Keysight Technologies and Ms. Silvia Almagia, ETSI CTI Technical Expert jointly presented “Measuring NFV Evolution: ETSI NFV Plugtests”.
  • Mr. Borja Nogales, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, presented “An NFV system to support service provisioning on UAV platforms: a walkthrough on implementation experience and standardization challenges”.
  • Dr. Lingli Deng, China Mobile, presented “From Orchestration Towards Automation”
  • Dr. Haopeng Zhu, Huawei Technologies Co., presented “Towards the future of NFV: Edge-native, Containerization, Networking-NFV convergence”.
  • Mr. Gianpietro Lavado, Whitestack, presented about the advances in deployment of standardized NFV Orchestration through ETSI OSM.


The ENI#17 meeting on 8-11 March 2021 was “online only” due to travel restrictions or delegates not allowed to travel.

  • 26 were present, 29 were registered,
  • Operators were present from: China Telecom, China Mobile, TIM, Deutsche Telekom, and Portugal Telecom, Also, NTT, Telefonica & Vodafone (messaging the Chair),
  • 121 documents were handled.

The meeting was very productive and achieved significant progress. The meeting progressed the work-items to stable output on the deliverables Draft report ENI 009 on Data Processing mechanisms planned to be approved at the end of March 2021. Report ENI 008 Intent aware architecture is in publication, the Group Report on the evaluation of categories report ENI 010 is published as v1.1.1 describing measures of automation of the Classes published in 2019 in report ENI 007 v1.1.1.

An open area is approved, for all stable drafts and previously published deliverables are available.



Last week I transitioned the position of Chair of ETSI MEC over to Dario Sabella from Intel.   Having spent four amazing years serving as the Chair of this group, I am happy to see it in such good hands.   For years Dario has been a significant contributor and an enthusiastic advocate of our work.  He’s been the driving force behind many of our Hackathons.  Moreover, Intel’s support and commitment for the group is a strong signal of our importance.  The best days for MEC are in the future and this is where all of us should look.  Still, leaving a position such as this, one does tend to reflect on one’s years of tenure and so for my last blog as Chair I am going to do just that.