In its latest release, ETSI’s NFV Industry Specification Group has added 5G resource management and orchestration aspects to its NFV architecture framework.
New 5G-related features in ETSI’s NFV (network functions virtualisation) Release 3 include support for network slicing in NFV; management over multi-administrative domains; and multi-site network connectivity.
The NFV group says these features are essential to address the variety of applications expected to run on top of a 5G system, whether using distributed resources over multiple sites, centralised or a combination of both.
“As a founding partner in 3GPP, ETSI has a major role to play in contributing and aligning specifications and requirements,” said Cristina Badulescu, ETSI ISG NFV Vice-Chair.
Collaboration
ETSI’s NFV Industry Specification Group collaborates closely with 3GPP’s SA5 Working Group on the network management aspects of NFV systems.
The organisations say this partnership is crucial to interoperability between management systems, including upper orchestration and management layers, such as network management or application management.
The 3GPP-defined management system interacts with ETSI’s NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) system to enable the resource management for virtualised Core Network (CN), virtualised Radio Access Network (RAN) and network slicing.
A statement from ETSI explains, “In NFV Release 3, an external touchpoint between the NFV’s Network Service and network slicing was defined – in which the Network Service becomes a composite element of the 3GPP SA5 network slice subnet construct – enabling market implementations to easily combine the 3GPP SA5 Network Resource Model (NRM) with the ETSI NFV Information Model.”