Huawei, ONF collaborate on wireless transport SDN

The wireless transport part of the software defined networking (SDN) stack works and Huawei and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) have the proof, they say.

Huawei has announced that in October it collaborated with the ONF in a successful multi-vendor Proof of Concept (PoC) exercise in Madrid. The experiment was hosted by Telefonica and the IMDEA Networks Institute and involved four wireless transport vendors as well as a router manufacturer.

The exercise was designed to encourage more development of open SDN over wireless transport mechanisms. It also set out to demonstrate that multi-layer optimisation could be achieved by using the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) controllers for SDN.

The test cases included a capacity-driven air interface and flow-based shaping. The former gives an indication of how a network adapts to traffic demand and juggles wireless resources for a more energy efficient operation of the transport network. Meanwhile successful flow-based shaping tests reflect the network’s ability to respond to changing conditions as, say, the weather affects the wireless transport networks.

For the tests, Huawei used SDN based RTN900 microwave equipment with OpenFlow interface for the PoC.