In a keynote speech to the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, Ewaldsson said: "SDN in the telco-operator domain is much more than the Layer 2 communications protocol OpenFlow. It's not about only managing the data planes in switches and routers, but about having fully integrated network control by connecting the SDN management layer to the cloud and network management."
The OpenFlow based view of SDN is being championed by the Open Networking Foundation, an organisation founded and run by large user organisations including Google, Facebook and Microsoft that is "dedicated to the transformation of networking through the development and standardisation of software-defined networking (SDN)."
Ewaldsson, however said that what was needed was "a new view on networking," that would enable network operators to "orchestrate network resources on different layers for different purposes under the same management system."
Changes will be needed to the SDN architecture to make this possible, he said. "The SDN architecture must also provide network awareness to the application layer through service exposure APIs. At the same time, we need innovation on the support system side. OSS and BSS and big data analytics provide the insight into the network and user behaviour that allow the operator to adapt and manage the network to serve the user."
Ewaldsson said the new IP network "needs to be something beyond the network we built for the Internet boom. It should be 'aware of' users, services, devices, location and scale in bandwidth and connections/signalling, at the same time as being much simpler to operate and maintain."
Telco networks must become software defined networks - Ericsson
Software defined networking technology must be expanded from the control of switches and routers in data centres into telco networks where it has the potential to lower costs and create new opportunities for network operators, according to Ericsson CTO Ulf Ewaldsson.
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Stuart Corner
Tracking the telecoms industry since 1989, Stuart has been awarded Journalist Of The Year by the Australian Telecommunications Users Group (twice) and by the Service Providers Action Network. In 2010 he received the 'Kester' lifetime achievement award in the Consensus IT Writers Awards and was made a Lifetime Member of the Telecommunications Society of Australia. He was born in the UK, came to Australia in 1980 and has been here ever since.
