ETSI Blog

Release of new NFV specifications V5.2.1

2025-05-06 Posted by Yuya Kuno, NFV SOL Chair 103 Hits

The ETSI Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualization (ISG NFV) has published its specifications of Release 5 second drop as version 5.2.1. In this version, some features were further progressed introducing additional enhancements to the NFV framework. Examples of features include enhanced container networking, NFV for 5G, VNF configuration, Green NFV. A major outcome in this version was the completion of the stage 3 level specification of Telco Cloud data analytics service. This version 5.2.1 is an intermediate version within Release 5, and some of the features are thus still under development. It is expected that the stage 3 work will be completed in subsequent ed531.

F5G Advanced Premium Cloud Immersive Services showcased at MWC’25

2025-04-15 Posted by Lluis Gifre Renom (CTTC) ISG F5G contributor 111 Hits

At the Mobile World Congress 2025, the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) and Huawei Technologies showcased a cutting-edge Proof of Concept (PoC) focused on the development of a standards-based and open-source Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform. This initiative aligns with specifications from key standards organizations such as ETSI, IETF, and CAMARA, and is built upon open-source components including ETSI TeraFlowSDN (TFS) and ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM). The proposed solution highlights the capabilities of the ETSI Industrial Specification Group (ISG) Fifth Generation Fixed (F5G) Network. This demonstration introduced a set of technical Fixed 5G technology enhancements focused on end-to-end service delivery and network automation, using an immersive Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) Gaming Service for Remote Players as a practical application of the F5G Advanced (F5G-A) architecture. The platform demonstrated end-to-end QoD capabilities, incorporating application-flow classification and differentiation. To support this, the setup was expanded to include a dedicated IP transport network for best-effort traffic, operating alongside the fine-grain Optical Transport Network (fgOTN), which was used for traffic requiring guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). This allowed the system to differentiate between traffic types and manage them accordingly.

F5G Advanced Premium Cloud Immersive Services showcased at MWC25 1

NFV#48 Plenary meeting

2025-02-12 Posted by Yuya Kuno, NFV SOL Chair 496 Hits

The ETSI NFV community recently gathered for its NFV#48 plenary meeting, which took place from December 9 to 13, 2024, at the ETSI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France. This marked a significant return to the ETSI headquarters after a series of plenary meetings held at various locations across Asia and Europe.

The NFV#48 plenary provided dedicated sessions for all participants, enabling focused discussions on technical advancements without the distractions of joint events. However, ETSI hosted a social evening event on Tuesday 10th of December, during which Yoshihiro Nakajima (ISG Chair, NTT DOCOMO) presented the 2024 ETSI NFV Excellence Awards to five outstanding members: Janusz Pieczerak (Orange), Xia Haitao (Huawei), Ju Manchang (ZTE), Leslie Willis (BT), and Afaf Arfaoui (NTT DOCOMO). Congratulations to all awardees for their invaluable contributions to the ETSI NFV community!

NFV48 P1

2024 ETSI NFV Excellence Awards

ISG F5G Poster Showcase @ ITU-ETSI Symposium on ICT Sustainability: F5G-A Energy Efficiency Management

2025-01-28 Posted by Raul Muñoz, CTTC, ISG F5G contributor 321 Hits

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) jointly organized the "ITU-ETSI Symposium on ICT Sustainability: Standards Driving Environmental Innovation", held on 11–12 December 2024 at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. It brought together industry leaders, policymakers, researchers and stakeholders to explore the crucial role of standards in promoting sustainable ICT practices. Standards guide the development of technologies that minimize environmental impact and enhance energy efficiency.

Optical Networking Moving into Industrial Environments

2025-01-24 Posted by Jialiang Jin, Vice-Chair of ETSI ISG F5G 312 Hits

The ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Fifth Generation Fixed Network (F5G) releases the specification titled "Fifth Generation Fixed Network (F5G); Specification for PON based Industrial Network".

Passive Optical Network (PON) is the dominant access network technology for operators all around the world and has been widely deployed in public access networks. It has the advantages of large bandwidth, low deployment cost, uses passive optical distribution network, carrier-grade quality and smart operation and maintenance capabilities.

Workshop on "Evolution of Optical Network Generations: Technologies and Standards" in Jingdezhen, China

2025-01-13 Posted by Yi Lin, ISG F5G Technical Manager 328 Hits

In the week of November 12th to 15th 2024, both the 20th ETSI ISG F5G Plenary meeting and CCSA TC6 WG2 plenary meeting were held, co-located in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, China.

On November 13th 2024 during the two meetings, a workshop on "Evolution of Optical Network Generations: Technologies and Standards" was held. Six experts from both ISG F5G and CCSA TC6 WG2 shared the latest progress of technologies and standards development of optical networks. A panel discussion was held over the topics of future technologies and standard cooperation to promote the next generation of optical networks. The panellists include:

  • Dr. Dechao Zhang, CCSA TC6 WG2 Vice Chair, China Mobile
  • Dr. Olivier Ferveur, ETSI ISG F5G Chair, POST Luxembourg
  • Dr. Jialiang Jin, ETSI ISG F5G Vice Chair, China Telecom
  • Mr. Hai Ding, Network innovative product expert from China Unicom
  • Ms. Qian Liu, ETSI ISG F5G TEST WG Chair, CAICT
  • Dr. Raul Muñoz, Research Director, CTTC
  • Dr. Marcus Brunner (Moderator), ETSI ISG F5G Vice Chair, Huawei

Evolution of Optical Network Generations1

NFV#47: Reunion by the Seine River, accelerate study topics on Release 6 NFV evolution

2024-12-20 Posted by Haitao XIA, NFV IFA Chair 331 Hits

In October golden autumn, ETSI ISG NFV#47 meeting was hosted by Huawei, in Versailles area in Paris, France, from October 7th to 11th, 2024. The meeting hotel was very close to NetworkX 2024 exhibition venue, which facilitated the participation of ETSI NFV delegates to both events. The slightly cold and often rainy weather did not prevent people’s enthusiasm from discussion and communication in technical topics. The community focused on promoting Release 6 NFV evolution activities, and exchanged ideas with experts joining the NetworkX event, on Telco cloud topics and the future of NFV.

How AI and Open Source are Shaping the Future of Telco Cloud

2024-12-19 Posted by Yoshihiro Nakajima, ISG NFV Chair 1213 Hits

How AI and Open Source are shaping the future of Telco Cloud

The telecommunications industry is undergoing a profound transformation, with AI-native and open-source technologies taking center stage. These innovations are not just enhancing operational efficiency but redefining the architecture of networks. Here’s an overview of how leading standard organizations are leveraging AI‑native and open-source tools to build the telco cloud of tomorrow. ETSI ISG NFV organized a new “Telco Cloud and AI Native” open session on October 7th, 2024, during the ETSI NFV#47 meeting in Paris, France. This event was a key opportunity for telecom operators, vendors, and other participants to exchange opinions on this important topic. It also explored the opportunities and challenges of using AI technologies in the telco cloud domain. The open session was divided into the following 3 parts, with 6 presentations from industry partners.

ETSI ISG NFV - LF Sylva joint workshop at NetworkX 2024

2024-12-04 Posted by Hammad Zafar (NEC), Joan Triay (DOCOMO), Brendan Hasset (Huawei, TSC Chair) 453 Hits

On October 10th 2024, ETSI ISG NFV and Linux Foundation (LF) Europe project Sylva (https://sylvaproject.org/), hosted a joint workshop at the Paris NetworkX 2024 event (https://networkxevent.com/) held in October 2024, to continue the collaboration between the two organizations in mutual areas of interest. Details about the first joint workshop in March 2024, initiating possible cooperation between the two organizations can be seen in the blogpost at https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/blogs/entry/nfv-45-plenary-meeting. Both organizations share common goals of transforming large-scale telecom networks based on the cloud-native principles. A simplified cloud-native framework for managing telco workloads as well as the Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) infrastructure layer, energy efficiency and security across the framework are among the mutual goals of NFV and Sylva.

Network X ISG F5G Workshop: F5G-A from Standards to Commercial Deployment

2024-11-04 Posted by Yi Lin, ISG F5G Technical Manager 350 Hits

Network X 2024 took place from October 8th to 10th at the international conference centre, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles in France. ETSI, a partner of Network X, hosted the "Partner Workshop with ETSI ISG F5G" on the first day of Network X.

This workshop focused on F5G-Advanced initiatives, highlighting the latest developments and progress. It provided the participants with the status norms and the achievement made in F5G-Advanced, which will help to evolve fixed networks.

ISG F5G Workshop Network X

In picture are the five speakers who shared their F5G-Advanced viewpoints, plus the moderator. From left to right we have:

  • Dr. Philippe Chanclou, Team Manager of Fixed Access Networks, Orange
  • Dr. Olivier Ferveur, ETSI ISG F5G Chair, Post Luxembourg
  • Dr. Behnam Shariati, Deputy Head of Group Data Analytics and Signal Processing, Fraunhofer HHI
  • Dr. Diego Lopez, ETSI ISG ZSM Chair, Senior Technology Expert, Telefonica
  • Mr. Riku Päärni, CTO, Lounea
  • Dr. Marcus Brunner (moderator), ETSI ISG F5G Vice Chair, Chief Expert Standardization, Huawei

NFV IFA and EVE Interim meeting – a step to NFV evolution

2024-10-29 Posted by NFV IFA Chairs 526 Hits

This September, the IFA and EVE working groups of the ETSI ISG NFV met face-to-face in Munich from 3rd to 5th September, 2024. The meeting was hosted by NTT DOCOMO in their premises in the west of Munich.

Edition ed521 of NFV specifications in Release 5 was continuously progressing NFV standards for 8 features on basis of the first edition of Release 5 (ed511), of which the most prominent ones are “Green NFV” (energy efficiency), “PIM” (physical infrastructure management) and VNF Generic OAM functions and other PaaS Services, which had major updates in edition 5.2.1.

Overall, the evolution of all features included updates in the basic NFV specifications, such as the functional requirements in IFA010 and the interface specifications of the well-known reference points and services.

NFV nttdocomo

ETSI ZSM/F5G Joint Session: Starting the ISG Cooperation on Intelligent Optical Network

2024-10-03 Posted by Yi Lin, ISG F5G Technical Manager 568 Hits

The 19th ETSI ISG F5G Plenary meeting was held in Sophia-Antipolis, France from August 27th to 30th 2024. As part of the Plenary meeting, an open session between ISG ZSM and ISG F5G was held. This is the first time these two ISGs have met together.

The ISG ZSM works on defining technical-agnostic end-to-end network and service management and operation framework and key technologies, which enables autonomous and future network. It is the goal of ISG F5G to apply the ZSM framework and its key enabling technologies, such as intent-based networking, Network Digital-Twin (NDT) and closed-loop automation, in the intelligent management and control of the F5G-A optical network.

Proof of concept "Cloud-based control of automated guided vehicles (AGV) and robots" finalized

2024-10-02 Posted by Sergii Shykin, ISG F5G Secretary (Huawei) 813 Hits

Modern production facilities have to support on demand product customization to satisfy customer needs. One key technology to make this happen are Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). These are mobile transport robots, which distribute raw materials and parts on the factory shop floor and potentially among different manufacturing halls and warehouses. The navigation of the AGVs on the factory shop floor or in outdoor areas is a computationally complex task requiring significant computing resources. Cloud-based AGV navigation enables cooperation and centralized information exchange between multiple robots and AGVs.

As the number and variation of AGVs within a production facility site increases, so does the complexity of their control, for guaranteeing a seamless and orchestrated operation.

Cloud based control of automated guided vehicles AGV and robots1

Figure 1

F5G - A Use Case Release 4: Driving the evolution of F5G-A

2024-09-23 Posted by Yue Sun, Rapporteur of a Work Item 605 Hits

In the ISG F5G F2F#19 plenary meeting held in Sophia-Antipolis, France from August 27th to 30th 2024, the creation of a new Work Item (WI) for F5G-A Use Cases Release 4 was agreed. The new work item is proposed by China Unicom and has eight supporting organizations including Orange, China Telecommunications, ZTE Corporation, CTTC, Huawei Technologies France, CAICT, POST Luxembourg and CICT. Mr. Yue Sun from China Unicom is the Rapporteur of this WI.

Global SDOs collaborate to advance FTTR: Highlights from Fourth Joint Workshop of ETSI ISG F5G, BBF, CCSA TC6 and ITU-T SG15

2024-08-01 Posted by Yi Lin, ISG F5G Technical Manager 1383 Hits

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) together with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute – Industry Specification Group -Fifth Generation Fixed Network (ETSI ISG F5G), the Broadband Forum (BBF), and the China Communications Standards Association – Technical Committee 6 (CCSA TC6) organized the Fourth Joint ETSI ISG F5G, BBF, CCSA TC6 and ITU-T SG15 Workshop on "FTTR" (Fibre to the room), which took place 10 July 2024 from 8:00-12:00 (EDT)/14h00 to 18h00 (CEST) in Montreal, Canada.

The use case of on-premises fibre networks, such as FTTR, was firstly described in ETSI GR F5G 002 by the ISG F5G early in 2020. Since then, the related standards have been rapidly developed by several Standard Development Organisations (SDOs). The workshop intend was to offer the opportunity to continue the discussion on FTTR and other on-premises fibre networks for all the involved stakeholders, to reach a better common understanding of the use cases, the requirements, the deployment challenges, and the best practices. This workshop facilitates the development of an FTTR standard and the cooperation of multiple SDOs, as well as the system deployment by the network operators.

Fourth joint FTTR Workshop with logos

NFV#46: Standardizing NFV in the Historic City of Xi'an

2024-07-16 Posted by Hammad Zafar, NEC Lab 1933 Hits

The 46th plenary meeting of ETSI NFV took place in the historic city of Xi’an, China between 3rd and 7th June 2024. The NFV#46 meeting was hosted by ZTE Corporation in their ZTE Hotel building. The ISG community was very pleased to attend the first ETSI NFV plenary meeting back in China since the pandemic. Apart from enjoying various kinds of delicious traditional food during the week, the meeting attendees made the most of their trip by exploring the beautiful city of Xi’an. A few of the participants even managed to visit the ‘Terracotta Army’ at the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, which is located in one of the districts of Xi’an.

Opening plenary session at NFV46

Figure 1: Opening plenary session at NFV#46

F5G Advanced Use Cases Driving the Optical Network Technology development

2024-07-05 Posted by Marcus Brunner, Vice-Chair of ETSI ISG F5G 2013 Hits

ETSI GR F5G 020, F5G Advanced Use Cases; Release 3 is publishing use cases to be enabled by the F5G Advanced (F5G-A) network. The use cases in that document include services and applications for residential customer, enterprises, vertical industries, network operation optimizations, and evolved fixed end-to-end infrastructure, which were not supported by the F5G network. Use cases will aim to introduce new technical requirements for the F5G Advance network along various characteristic dimensions. The use cases will be used as input to drive the technology development and standardization of new features for F5G Advanced based on the technical requirements derived from those use cases.

NFV cloud-native Roundtable held after NFV#46

2024-07-03 Posted by Manchang JU, ISG NFV TSC Vice Chair, ZTE Corporation 2535 Hits

On June 3rd, 2024, an ETSI NFV cloud-native roundtable was held as an activity following the ETSI NFV#46 F2F meeting hosted by ZTE Corporation in ZTE Hotel, Xi’an, China. This roundtable focused on sharing views and challenges for the current and future Telco Cloud and its relationship with AI technologies. Representatives from Chinese organizations like China Mobile, China telecom, and China Unicom, China Communications Standards Association (CCSA) SP1, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), as well as delegates from vendors discussed  hot topics and technological prospects in the industry of Telco Cloud native & AI, so as to promote the development of relative standardization activities.

Fourth Joint ETSI ISG F5G, BBF, CCSA TC6 and ITU-T SG15 Workshop on "FTTR" (Fibre to the room)

2024-06-25 Posted by Yan Zeng, HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES Co. Ltd 2712 Hits

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) together with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute – Industry Specification Group -Fifth Generation Fixed Network (ETSI ISG F5G), the Broadband Forum (BBF), and the China Communications Standards Association – Technical Committee 6 (CCSA TC6) are organizing the Fourth Joint ETSI ISG F5G, BBF, CCSA TC6 and ITU-T SG15 Workshop on "FTTR" (Fibre to the room), which will take place 10 July 2024 from 8:00‑12:00 (EDT)/14h00 to 18h00 (CEST) in Montreal, Canada. This is an in-person event with remote participation.

ITU Webinars Workshop on FTTR

ICIN 2024 events related to ETSI NFV activities

2024-05-21 Posted by Kostas Katsalis, WG IFA Vice-Chair 3804 Hits

In the context of the 27th Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks (ICIN) 2024, Intelligent network service management across the compute continuum, the week March 11th–15th, 2024, at Orange Gardens in Paris France (co-hosted with ETSI NFV#45 plenary meeting in the same week), ETSI NFV officials and contributors were invited to participate in main events demonstrating the latest ETSI NFV specification status, recent developments and future directions.

Details of the main event can be found in https://www.icin-conference.org/2024/

Event: 1st Workshop on iNtent drivEn autonomouS neTwORks (NESTOR) 2024

Site URL: https://www.icin-conference.org/2024/nestor/

NFV#45 Plenary Meeting

2024-04-24 Posted by Janusz Pieczerak, ISG NFV Vice-Chair 10026 Hits

Sophia Antipolis, 24 April 2024

The ETSI NFV community met for its NFV#45 Plenary Meeting in March 2024, from the 11th to the 18th, in Paris, France. This meeting was hosted by Orange SA at its innovation center, Orange Gardens, in Chatillon, which is located in a suburb of Paris. The ETSI NFV community visited the same venue during the NFV#27 Plenary Meeting in September 2019.

NFV45 Orange Gardens Paris

Figure 1: Orange Gardens, Paris

MEC, interoperable API exposure, software focus

2024-04-17 Posted by Dario SABELLA, MEC Chair 4778 Hits

 2024-04-17

Hello, I have promised to come back to you once we have announced the MEC Phase 3 finalization. So, here you can find the Press Release issued by ETSI, related to publications of our last Phase 3 deliverables, but also announcing the start of some relevant work for Phase 4.

As a couple of hints more, I wanted to signal you:

The forthcoming ETSI Webinar on "CAPIF from Standards to Practice: Synergy between 3GPP, ETSI MEC and OpenCAPIF ", planned for April 30th, 2024, with speakers from these three groups. The webinar is in my opinion a great example of fruitful collaboration between ETSI MEC and 3GPP, in the view of enabling interoperable API consumption from various API invokers, and can be relevant for application developers as the aim is to provide an excellent piece of information on this complex standardization activity, together with the possibility to understand the possible synergies of MEC with the recently established Software Development Group (SDG) in ETSI called OpenCAPIF.

Second aspect of interest is the progress of the newly started ETSI STF (Special Task Force) "Edge Native Connector ". This STF 678 is planned to build on the MEC Sandbox, and will deliver an edge application development experimentation environment, based on the cross-organisation harmonisation efforts that have been led by ETSI MEC. That includes alignment with 3GPP, in particular the WG SA6 defined EDGEAPP architecture (stage 2) with associated CT1 & CT3 specified APIs (stage 3); GSMA’s Operator Platform, which facilitates edge federation and capability exposure to application service providers; 5GAA, who have provided V2X related requirements directly to ISG MEC. This activity can also enable future synergies in MEC Phase 4 with OpenCAPIF.

…Well, if the above information on MEC is still too technical for you, you may want to start from the basics, and have a look at our Wiki page (https://mecwiki.etsi.org/), where we have added also a nice Q&A session, on  “everything you wanted to know about MEC”. Also, we plan to update this page with additional Q&A in the future. Enjoy the reading!!

Proof of Concept “Visual Inspection for automatic quality assessment”

2024-04-12 Posted by Sergii Shykin, ISG F5G Secretary (Huawei) 4766 Hits

The development of the proof of concept "Visual inspection for automatic quality assessment PoC" started in May 2023 and was successfully finished in November 2023. Several goals have been set:

  • implementation of a PON based industrial Edge/Cloud-based; and
  • visual inspection for quality assessment of products and to demonstrate a low-latency ML‑based video processing-pipeline for end-to-end manufacturing control loop.

PROOF OF CONCEPT Fig0

Roundtable at NFV#45

2024-04-12 Posted by DENG HUI, NFV Vice Chair 4539 Hits

March 18 2024

On March 18, the ETSI NFV cloud-native roundtable was held as an activity associated with the NFV#45 F2F meeting hosted by Orange in Orange Gardens, Paris. This roundtable focused on sharing the views, challenges for the current telco cloud and proposals for the telco cloud's way forwards with the joint efforts from standards and open sources. Representatives from European operators like Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, Telecom Italia, and British Telecom, and Asian operators like China Mobile and NTT DOCOMO, as well as delegates from vendors worldwide come together to discuss the achievements, pain points, and future expectations of our industry.

ISG THz meets Face-to-Face for the fifth time, this time in Oslo

2024-03-26 Posted by Per Hjalmar Lehne 4967 Hits

The fifth face to face meeting of the ISG THz was held on 5th and 6th March 2024 in Oslo. The venue was Telenor headquarters, only 15 minutes outside Oslo city centre. The meeting was attended, in a hybrid mode, by 29 participants representing 19 companies. This comprised industry and academia from 10 countries, including participants from China, Korea and USA. During these days, Oslo gave a first flavour of spring with sunny weather and temperatures up to plus 8 degrees, after a mid-winter period of heavy snow and rain.

The Telenor building

The Telenor building
(Source: Wikimedia Commons, Hogne, Telenorbygget Fornebu fra vest (8. juni 2018), CC BY-SA 4.0)

Revolutionary F5G-based VR Gaming Service at Mobile World Congress 2024

2024-03-25 Posted by Lluis Gifre Renom (CTTC) ISG F5G contributor 5509 Hits

At the Mobile World Congress 2024, the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) and Huawei Technologies introduced a groundbreaking Proof of Concept (PoC) that underscores the capabilities of the ETSI Industrial Specification Group (ISG) Fifth Generation Fixed Network (F5G). This demonstration exemplified a significant leap in Fixed 5G technology, using a Virtual Reality (VR) Gaming Service for Remote Players as a practical application of the F5G Advanced (F5G-A) architecture. The F5G-A architecture exploits the optical network capacities to provide high quality transmission with ultra-low end-to-end latency, high bandwidth guarantees, and minimized jitter to ensure the Quality of Experience (QoE) for cloud-based services. This architecture promises to reshape a myriad of high-demand digital services, offering unparalleled connectivity and intelligent End-to-End (E2E) service management.

CAMARA F5G A Optical Network

Driving F5G Advanced ahead

2024-03-11 Posted by Yi Lin, ISG F5G Technical Manager 5012 Hits

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 Chair 12188 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.

NFV#44 - Roundtable

2024-02-07 Posted by Yoshihiro Nakajima, ISG NFV Chair 11767 Hits

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.

An outstanding end of 2023, and great finalization of MEC Phase 3 work

2024-02-01 Posted by Dario SABELLA, MEC Chair 4516 Hits

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!

ETSI HELD A WEBINAR ON "HOW CAN ALL-OPTICAL NETWORKS CONTRIBUTE TO CARBON TRANSITION?"

2024-01-29 Posted by Yi Lin, ISG F5G Technical Manager 4906 Hits

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

Release of new NFV specifications V4.5.1

2024-01-29 Posted by NFV support 11933 Hits

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.

ENI Release 4 progressing

2024-01-04 Posted by Dr Ray Forbes, ETSI ISG ENI Chair 5012 Hits

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.

ETSI RELEASED THE F5G ADVANCED GENERATION DEFINITION, PROMOTING THE EVOLUTION OF F5G

2023-12-14 Posted by Yi Lin, ISG F5G Technical Manager 5838 Hits

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

ISG THz meets twice in Germany following the trace of “Henry the Lion”

2023-12-08 Posted by Thomas Kuerner, THz Chair 5246 Hits

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.

NFV#43 transitions to Release 6 studies and Release 5 normative work

2023-10-18 Posted by Ulrich Kleber, Chair NFV TSC 12089 Hits

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.

ETSI NFV Telco Cloud-native Executive Roundtable at NFV#43 Plenary

2023-10-10 Posted by DENG HUI, NFV Vice Chair 13443 Hits

(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.

MEC for Drones Panel: Unlocking 5G Edge Value for the Drone Industry

2023-08-10 Posted by Nurit Sprecher, NOKIA 7251 Hits

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.

Second “F2F meeting” of ISG THz in Durham

2023-07-21 Posted by Sana Salous, ETSI ISG Thz Vice Chair 5877 Hits

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         

ETSI NFV Telco Cloud-native Roundtable at MWC Shanghai (June 29, 2023 Shanghai)

2023-07-07 Posted by DENG HUI, NFV Vice Chair 13727 Hits

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.

NFV#42 plenary with key focus on rejuvenating ETSI-NFV activities for the future

2023-06-27 Posted by Rajavarma Bhyrraju, WG IFA Vice Chair 12663 Hits

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.

A nice discussion with various speakers on Telco Edge Cloud evolution toward NaaS

2023-06-15 Posted by Dario SABELLA, MEC Chair 5842 Hits

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! 

Next step in NFV feature development published

2023-05-24 Posted by ISG NFV Leadership team 13197 Hits

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.

Interim face-to-face meeting of ETSI NFV IFA (Interfaces and Architecture) working group in Munich

2023-05-12 Posted by ISG NFV WG IFA 13018 Hits

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.

2023-04-04 Posted by Aurel Machalek, University of Luxembourg 5512 Hits

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.

NFV#41, start of a new decade for ISG NFV

2023-03-31 Posted by Haitao XIA, NFV IFA Chair 12916 Hits

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

2023-03-02 Posted by Mate Boban, ISG THz Vice Chair 5742 Hits

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

2023-01-09 Posted by Nurit Sprecher, ISG ZSM Vice Chair 6622 Hits

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.

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