ONF Connect 2018

SK Telecom (SKT) has successfully virtualized the telco infrastructure using OpenStack world first in July 2017 by following ETSI NFV architecture. SKT manages more than 90 VNFs (comprised of 1400 VMs) from different vendors, including IMS for nationwide VoLTE service and EPC for LTE data service. Resource virtualization provides infrastructure resource pool between different VNFs, reduces TCO by 45%, moreover it reduces the over three months of VNF deployment time to just 10 minutes. Despite of those advantages, VNF networks are not fully virtualized and configuration and operation require manual intervention, and their visibility and controllability are also very limited.  To overcome those limitations, we have developed the “Cloud VIM” along with various cutting-edge technologies including cloud native support, SDN based virtual network management using SONA (Simple Overlay Network Architecture), integrated monitoring system, network analytics solution, and CI/CD. We are trying to deploy the Cloud VIM into telco production, expecting the Cloud VIM enhances the flexibility and robustness of SKT’s 5G infrastructure.

Also, when 5G Phase II standard is released and the architecture is re-designed with microservice architecture, we also expect that VNF will be containerized supporting higher level operation utilizing cloud native features, such as auto scaling, auto healing, rolling upgrade etc. In this talk, I will also introduce the plan for SKT’s MANO and Cloud VIM to support containerized VNF.