Huawei Collaborates With Broadband Forum OB-BAA Community to Unveil First Automated Access Prototype

BERLIN — At Broadband World Forum 2018, Huawei, Broadband Forum (BBF), and other members of the Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction(OB-BAA) community unveiled an OB-BAA 1.0 prototype that is fully compliant with the Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) standard. The prototype demonstrates the automatic deployment of access devices, automatic service provisioning, and unified management of multiple vendors’ devices based on CloudCO BAA layer.

The BBF CloudCO architecture standard serves as a critical reference for operators restructuring their broadband network architecture and is a key step towards cloud-based networks. As a key technology of BBF CloudCO, the BAA layer defines an access node management abstraction layer in the network cloudification architecture to enable the CloudCO system to mask the differences between various physical devices and access media, thereby supporting fast integration of new types of devices, automatic service provisioning, and the cloudification of operators’ existing network devices. The BAA layer has been a topic of discussion in the industry for some time now, and more than 13 operators and vendors have been actively involved in the OB-BAA project.

“The Forum is very pleased with the results of the collaboration in the OB-BAA project. Huawei has been a part of this Open Broadband project from the beginning, and has helped drive this multi-vendor cooperation to the first prototype. We are looking forward to the first commercial deployment soon”, said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum.

As the vice chair and code contributor of the BAA open source community, Huawei has been involved in the development of the CloudCO BAA 1.0 prototype and has successfully launched and demonstrated the prototype together with other OB-BAA participants. The prototype supports automatic deployment and service provisioning of OLTs and G.fast distribution point units (DPUs), online upgrade and automatic synchronization of devices based on the YANG model, and unified management of devices from multiple vendors. The prototype demonstrates the design concept and architectural advantages of the BBF CloudCO standard and provides the industry with an important reference implementation of CloudCO. It also explores the possibility of commercialized BBF-compliant network cloudification and is a step closer to the industrial deployment of CloudCO.

Huawei has also been actively involved in the CloudCO standard verification tests organized by BBF. In August 2018, Huawei’s CloudCO-based virtual Residential Gateway (vRG) was the first of its kind to pass the service tests at the BBF’s Open Broadband Laboratory Asia. The tests covered the self-servicing and automatic service provisioning functions of vRGs.

Huawei, as a co-leader of the BBF CloudCO standard group, is actively promoting the standardization of CloudCO. Huawei has worked with around 20 international operators and equipment vendors to jointly release the CloudCO architecture standard. This represents an important contribution to the shaping of the future network architecture. Huawei will continue to contribute to standard and industry organizations based on the value proposition of the Intent-Driven Network (IDN) and will work with the industry to promote the industrialization of CloudCO.