Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia and Cisco join forces on NFV testing

Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia and Cisco have teamed up to launch a new initiative that aims to help telecoms operators address the challenges related to NFV deployment and cloud transformation within multi-vendor network environments.

The four signed Tuesday a MoU to create the NFV Interoperability Testing Initiative (NFV-ITI), which will address NFV multi-vendor interoperability challenges for telcos, enabling them to optimize NFV deployment and integration costs, and reduce time-to-market for new services.

While telecos are at different stages of implementing NFV into their networks, the deployment and integration of virtual network functions within today’s multi-vendor environments can introduce new interoperability challenges.

To addresses these challenges, NFV-ITI members will cooperatively support the interoperability of NFV elements in specific customer situations to accelerate the commercial implementations, and to reduce the time-to-market for new applications and services.

All existing NFV interoperability related testing activities are triggered by different industry needs, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Testing WG, OPNFV testing projects, Network Vendor Interoperability Testing (NVIOT) testing, and the New IP Agency (NIA) interoperability testing.

NFV-ITI will complement all existing NFV interoperability testing activities in the industry and focus on testing interoperability configurations of commercial NFV solutions used in the telcos’ networks, the companies said.

It will recommend generic principles, including interoperability test cases, test criteria, processes, methods, guidelines, templates and testing tools, and will also apply best practices from all existing interoperability testing activities in the industry, such as NVIOT forum efforts.

In addition, NFV-ITI will be well-aligned with the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group and the OPNFV project.