Deploying SDN and NFV at the speed of innovation: toward a new bond between standards development organizations, industry fora and open-source software projects

Autor: Wouter Tavernier, Bram Naudts, Didier Colle, Sofie Verbrugge, Mario Pickavet
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
Zdroj: IEEE COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE
ISSN: 0163-6804
Popis: Standards development organizations (SDOs) exist to assure the development of consensus-based, quality standards. These formal standards are needed in the telecommunications market to achieve functional interoperability. The standardization process takes years, and then a vendor still needs to implement the resulting standard in a product. This prevents service providers (SPs) who are willing to venture into new domains from doing so at a fast pace. With the development of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), opensource technology is emerging as a new option in the telecommunications market. In contrast to SDOs, open-source software (OSS) communities create a product that may implicitly define a de-facto standard based on market consensus. Therefore, SPs are drawn to OSS, but they face technical, procedural, legal, and cultural challenges due to their lack of experience with open software development. The question therefore arises, how the interaction between OSS communities, SDOs, and industry fora (IF) can be organized to tackle these challenges. This article examines the evolving roles of OSS communities, IF, and SDOs, and places them in an NFV/SDN context. It sketches the differences between these roles and provides guidelines on how the interaction between them can turn into a mutually beneficial relationship that balances the conflicting goals of timely development on the one hand and technical excellence, openness, and fairness on the other, to reach their common goal of creating flexible and efficient telecommunications networks.
Databáze: OpenAIRE