The not-for-profit European Standards Organisation group has added 5G resource management and orchestration aspects on top of the NFV Release 2 architecture framework as part of its commitment to developing specifications that meet the needs of the industry.
NFV Release 2 aims to enable end-to-end interworking of equipment and services. As a founding partner in 3GPP, ETSI has a major role to play in contributing and aligning specifications and requirements.
Since 2012, ETSI has focused on specification work for NFV through its NFV Industry Specification Group. As 5G deployments begin, ETSI has collaborated with the 3GPP SA5 Working Group on the network management aspects of NFV systems.
New NFV Release 3 features that closely relate to 5G include support for network slicing, management over multi-administrative domains and multi-site network connectivity.
ETSI has described these aspects of its work as “essential to address the variety of applications expected to run on top of a 5G system, whether using distributed resources over multiple sites, centralised or a combination of both”.
ETSI and 3GPP have collaborated on specification work for ETSI NFV Release 2 and 3, to ensure interoperability between management systems, covering upper orchestration and management layers, such as network management or application management.
The 3GPP-defined management system interacts with ETSI NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) system to realise the resource management for virtualised core network, virtualised radio access network and network slicing.
ETSI stated: “In the NFV Release 3, an external touchpoint between the NFV’s network service and network slicing was defined, in which the network service becomes a composite element of the 3GPP SA5 network slice subnet construct, enabling market implementations to easily combine the 3GPP SA5 Network Resource Model (NRM) with the ETSI NFV Information Model.”
At the end of last year, ETSI’s millimetre Wave Transmission Industry Specification Group (mWT ISG) released the GR mWT 012 report, which addressed prominent 5G backhaul/X-Haul scenarios.
Capacity followed up on the report in an interview with Nader Zein, vice chair of mWT ISG, and focused on how the institute is keeping at the forefront of 5G developments.
Learn about how the wholesale market getting to grips with 5G.
