The white paper describes how a set of multi-vendor NFV benchmarks or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) can greatly improve integration efficiency while minimizing integration risks to facilitate multi-vendor NFV adoption.

The key challenges faced with multi-vendor NFV integration, due to a lack of industry standard benchmarks or KPIs, are the resulting higher costs of integration which inhibit larger scale multi-vendor NFV deployments. In order to achieve commercial usage capabilities, a set of KPIs are required to guide the multi-vendor NFV integration on various aspects including interoperability, compatibility, performances reliability and operation and manageability.

The paper introduces a Huawei multi-dimensional assessment framework that provides a reference point to evaluate the implementation feasibility of a multi-vendor NFV solution. It provides examples of KPI metrics that are supported by the evaluation system that can guide a multi-vendor NFV implementation. The evaluation system is constructed based on Huawei’s accumulated experiences in integrating multi-vendor NFV projects.

Huawei also describes the overall evaluation methodology that has been adopted to assess the overall technical feasibility based on the scores or strengths for each KPI metric. The evaluation methodology is applied to three use cases on end-to-end functionality, performances and reliability to explain the scoring mechanisms. The objective is to align CSP multi-vendor NFV strategy with important KPI metrics in order to identify the baseline capabilities of its multi-vendor NFV solution.