Huawei Presented Its Views of Software Defined Networking (SDN) For Carrier Networks

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, presented its views of Software Defined Networking (SDN) for Carrier networks, and described the prospects of SDN for Access, Metro and Backbone Networks, at the Broadband Forum's 2012 3rd quarter conference in Bucharest Romania.

SDN has been primarily connected to architecture's involving Data Center interworking. Huawei believes SDN will also bring huge benefits to Carrier networks. Customized Networks will be realized by applying network resource virtualization; through centralized management and orchestration to achieve efficient use of network resources; and through new technologies being rapidly applied to the existing network via the programmable interface between the control and data plane.

"You've had to continually ask vendors to place your specific feature request into their release plan, and wait for months, even years, for the feature to be delivered. With SDN, you could start an in house, or 3rd party, development project and quickly deploy that new service within your production network. We believe that SDN's benefit is the ability to respond to the changes of network technology in a simple and agile way. This functionality includes a series of changes in interface technology, access bandwidth, backbone link bandwidth, routing protocols, business models and architectures, to help large, inflexible, and difficult to manage elephants (Carrier networks) dance again!" said Michael McBride, Principal Engineer from Huawei.

Various, SDN for Carrier networks, architectures were presented, including Access Networks, Mobile Backhaul, Broadband Network Gateways, Metro Networks, and Optical Transport Networks. These SDN architectures produce widespread interest from networking experts and are considered to be of great value to the future development of carrier networks.

Along with internal R&D, Huawei is active in SDN standardization forums, such as the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), to help bring the SDN vision to reality. Huawei will continue to work on the standardization of SDN, in a coordinated manner, across standards development organizations.