OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

This talk describes a new service management toolkit, called XOS, built on top of OpenStack and ONOS (Open Network Operating System) to manage scalable services running in a Telco Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD). The goal of CORD is is to allow Telcos to benefit from both the economies of scale (infrastructure constructed from a few commodity building blocks) and the agility (the ability to rapidly deploy and elastically scale services) that cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Facebook enjoy today.

The first step in re-architecting the central office as a datacenter involves virtualizing the existing hardware devices, transforming each device into its software service counterpart running on merchant silicon (commodity servers, white-box switches, and commodity I/O blades). In the process, functionality is disaggregated and re-packaged in new ways. The current CORD proof-of-concept virtualizes three legacy Telco devices: Optical Line Termination (OLT), Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), and Broadband Network Gateways (BNG).

The second step in realizing CORD is orchestrating the virtualized devices (and other cloud services) to provide the end-to-end functionality subscribers require. To this end, the CORD software stack includes XOS, OpenStack, and ONOS. XOS provides explicit support for multi-tenant services, making it possible to create, name, operationalize, manage and compose services as first-class operations. In particular, it provides a framework for implementing and composing multi-tenant services that become part of the CORD service portfolio, thereby lowering the barrier for services to build on each other.

XOS builds on OpenStack, which manages virtual resources on a cluster of commodity servers. OpenStack is responsible for creating and provisioning virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks (VNs), while XOS defines a service abstraction on top of these virtual resources. It also builds on top of ONOS, which manages the cluster's switching fabric. ONOS hosts a collection of network control applications, while XOS incorporates those applications into the overall portfolio of CORD services.

We have implemented and demonstrate a proof-of-concept of CORD, and are currently preparing a "CORD POD" for field trials with service providers. This work is being done in collaboration with AT&T, PMC, Sckipio, and Akamai.