ETSI 3rd SDN mWT Plugtests Report published

Sophia Antipolis, 4 December 2020

The third ETSI mWT (millimetre Wave Transmission) SDN (Software Defined Network) Plugtestsā„¢ event was completed on 19 November 2020. The event report with all interoperability results is now available.

All test scenarios were successfully executed by each participating organization, reaching full compliance over the tests in scope. With respect to the previous event, a wider scope was planned with 50% increase in the number of execute tests. Among all tests executions, including repetitions, a success rate of 92% was achieved.

The event was conducted remotely across different countries, with the Centralized Network Controller located at ETSI in France and the vendors' equipment and domain controllers located at each vendors labs in Europe and Japan.

Building upon the second edition held earlier in 2020, the third mWT Plugtests kept the focus on the advantages of using a standard Northbound Interface (NBI) to minimize interoperability issues and ease multi-vendor/multi-technology operation. Over the two events conducted in 2020, a total of seven vendors and four operators participated in the mWT Plugtests, representing the majority of the market.

Despite a challenging time-frame, all tests were successfully completed by the participating microwave vendors demonstrating compliance to the IETF MDSC-PNC Interface (MPI). This interface is used for Network Discovery by retrieving the Microwave Topology, Ethernet Topology and the Ethernet Service Topology information, E2E L2 service provisioning and verifying the LLDP interoperability that is used for inter-domain link discovery.

Participants demonstrated great collaboration, namely on the common development of the test scripts, in a peer to peer environment and with voluntary contributions from many parties.

The role of ETSI providing technical support and overseeing the execution of the test has been emphasized by participants as very important in order to achieve high confidence in the results.