Heidelberg, Germany & Tokyo, Japan, September 30, 2015 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) and NEC Laboratories Europe today announced the development of the world's first interface supporting the Open Networking Foundation's (ONF) recently established "Real Time Media Northbound Interface (NBI) REST Specification," which allows real-time media (RTM) network applications, such as unified communications, to offer a better overall experience to the end-user by interacting with the software-defined networking (SDN) controller via northbound interfaces.

Specifically, NEC Laboratories Europe produced a proof of concept interface in accordance with the ONF specifications established in March 2015. The proof of concept uses SDN controllers supporting NEC's Virtual Tenant Network (VTN) interface (e.g. open-source OpenDaylight (www.opendaylight.org) or NEC's ProgrammableFlow), which control a mininet (www.mininet.org) emulated network of OVS (http://www.openvswitch.org/) softswitches. The newly developed VTN-based RTM network service is now freely available to the open-source community through the ASPEN project at ONF's www.opensourcesdn.org.

"Open and standardized northbound interfaces are a vital component for the growth and success of the SDN ecosystem," said Fabian Schneider, Senior Researcher at NEC Labs Europe and Deputy Area Director of the ONF Services Area, which includes the northbound interfaces specification and open-source projects. "The real time media NBI is a first step towards removing the burden for networked application developers to support and integrate with multiple SDN controller frameworks and architectures."

The VTN-based RTM network service interface will be showcased at the Layer123 SDN & OpenFlow World Congress from 12 - 16 October 2015 at the Swissotel Dusseldorf, Germany as part of the ONF booth.