ONAP prepares for Beijing release, sets focus on applications, operations

With its Amsterdam release behind them, ONAP is focused on preparing for the Beijing platform—the second release in its ongoing series of specifications.

Set to be released next summer, Beijing will include what ONAP calls "S3P" (scale, stability, security and performance) enhancements.

It will also include more use cases to support service provider needs, key 5G features, and intercloud connectivity. Additionally, ONAP says that interest from large enterprises “will likely further shape the platform and use cases in future releases.”

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Amsterdam spelled out two main missions: merge the code base from Open O and ECOMP and support use cases to run on the code base: residential CPE and virtual voice led by China Mobile.

“We completed Amsterdam in November and I have to say it is a huge success that they managed to support all of those use cases,” said Alla Goldner, director of technology, strategy and standardization for Amdocs, in an interview with FierceTelecom. “Considering the amount of work that we had done in a short amount of time, I think that was a huge success.”

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ONAP release schedule

Goldner, who was a presenter at last week's ONAP Beijing Release Developer Forum held in Santa Clara, California, said ONAP is taking an alternative approach for Beijing than it had with Amsterdam.

“With Amsterdam, we supported end-to-end use cases,” Goldner said. “We decided with the next release it should enable service providers to implement several specific capabilities.”

These capabilities will be broken out into two parts: platform enhancements as well as functional requirements. The platform enhancements include management and security while the functional requirements will be focused on leveraging elements from the use cases.

“When we have a use case proposal, we extract functional requirements from those use cases and generalize those requirements so they become generic for any potential use case and implement those into Beijing,” Goldner said. “The plan is then to continue this route for subsequent releases.”

One part of this plan will address change management to support any software upgrade or physical or virtual network functions. The final list of the functionalities, including the platform and functional enhancements, will be agreed upon in general.

“In general, we already agreed what the functions are and what’s needed to complete the final work,” Goldner said.