The Linux Foundation unveiled the second software release of its Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project, which it said delivers improvements in terms of scalability and ease of deployment.

ONAP Beijing also includes enhancements covering security and performance in real-world deployments, new training for Virtual Network Functions (VNF) developers and backing for operators commencing rollouts.

Mazin Gilbert, chair of ONAP’s Technical Steering Committee and VP of Advanced Technology at AT&T Labs, said in a statement the upgrades are another step toward “establishing ONAP as the de facto standard for automation”.

Teamwork
To achieve some of these improvements, ONAP collaborated with TM Forum and MEF on proof-of-concept trials to identify and resolve problems ahead of the Beijing release. The tests, known as Catalysts, combined external APIs from TM Forum and MEF in a number of different implementations to ensure the APIs could communicate with the ONAP platform.

Trial partners including AT&T, NTT, Orange, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone worked on 5G Catalysts tackling areas including intelligent service operations, service planning and optimisation, and automating network-as-a-service, among others.

Ken Dilbeck, VP of collaboration R&D at TM Forum, told Mobile World Live the close teamwork between open source groups and standards development organisations is a “game changer” which improves “the overall quality [of the technology] for the industry because we’re working together earlier and in a far more collaborative environment than in the past”.

He added the tests and early feedback also provide operators with more concrete information they can use for planning purposes.

“Now they can go and do a sizing estimate of what would it really take to ramp that up to scale, how do their business models look if it’s going to take this much money to put the infrastructure in place…[and] it allows them to do it in a shared risk environment where there are multiple participants who are working on this and there are multiple perspectives.”