The development comes as new technologies are being used and new features are being added to NFV in support of 5G and fixed access networks deployments are emerging in various countries. The work of release 4 is set to provide the setting to further enhance the NFV framework by considering recent technological advances, ways to simplify its usage in line with current network transformation trends.
“The technical topics comprising the Release 4 scope exemplify well how the NFV framework is continuously being enhanced to consider existing and new technology trends and provide the demanded support by network operators and network function providers for deploying current and future network generations,” said Joan Triay, technical manager, ETSI ISG NFV.
Release 4 will address several new issues in the following technical areas: the evolution of the NFV framework to support the most recent cloud, software and virtualisation techniques; novel management architectural styles and operationalisation aspects, leveraging virtualisation characteristics to simplify deployments; and increased support for automation.
At its 27th plenary meeting, the ETSI ISG NFV approved new release 4 work items to conduct a set of studies about service-based architecture design for NFV, VNF generic operations, administration and management (OAM) functions, as well as enablers for autonomous management in NFV management and orchestration (NFV-MANO).
Normative work in release 4 to enhance the support in the NFV framework for container-based deployment of VNFs was also started, addressing service interfaces for OS container management and orchestration, as well as the requirements for the management and orchestration of container cluster nodes.
The group will also continue the maintenance of Release 2 specifications, dealing with implementable protocol and data models, as well as their counterpart testing specifications to the end of 2019 and into 2020.
At the same time, protocols and data models for supporting Release 3 features are also under development.
