The European Telecommunications Standards Institute announced on Monday the results from its fourth ETSI NFV Plugtests, which took place last month in France.
For the first time, ETSI included multi-access edge computing (MEC) in its interoperability test sessions. The experimental MEC track covered testing in routing, application lifecycle, and MEC API.
MEC is being touted as one of the key technologies for 5G, and ETSI said it was important to assess the level of interoperability of NFV and edge solutions while also validating implementation's of NFV and MEC specifications and APIs.
Also, for the first time, the sessions include virtual network function managers (VNFMs) and NFV orchestrators from different providers. According to ETSI, the latest round of Plugtests showed positive results for operations such as onboarding, instantiation, manual scaling and termination. ETSI said the results led to important findings in several NFV specifications.
ETSI pioneered the NFV movement with an initial white paper seven years ago, but it has proven to be difficult for most service providers to implement. ETSI said the recent Plugtests were timely to finalize and validate the upcoming sixth release of ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM.)
RELATED: 'Lean NFV' takes center stage at Open Networking Summit
During the Open Networking Summit (ONS) North America earlier this year, "Lean NFV" was put forth as a concept that could alleviate the pains of implementing NFV. Also at ONS, the Common NFVi Telco Task Force announced during a panel session that its service provider members were working on reducing the number of NFV infrastructure versions that are currently in use by service providers.
The Common NFVI Telco Task Force (CNTT) met last week in Paris to go over its game plan. Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. and a long-standing critic of NFV, discusses some of the elements of the recent CNTT meeting in a blog post.