ETSI NFV announces new features to its architecture to support 5G

Sophia Antipolis, 1st July 2019: ETSI NFV has enhanced the system as well as designed new features to support 5G networks. Specifically, 5G resource management and orchestration aspects were added on top of the NFV Release 2 architecture framework. New NFV Release 3 features that closely relate to 5G include: “Support for network slicing in NFV”, “Management over multi-administrative domains”, and “Multi-site network connectivity”. These features are essential to address the variety of applications expected to run on top of a 5G system, whether using distributed resources over multiple sites, centralized or a combination of both.

Since early 2012, ETSI has made significant progress on specification work for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) through its NFV Industry Specification Group. As 5G deployments begin, the collaboration with the 3GPP SA5 Working Group - on the network management aspects of NFV systems - is proving very valuable.

“As a founding partner in 3GPP, ETSI has a major role to play in contributing and aligning specifications and requirements.” says Cristina Badulescu, ETSI ISG NFV Vice-Chair. 

ETSI and 3GPP collaboration has been key throughout the specification work of ETSI NFV Release 2 and 3, to ensure interoperability between management systems - covering upper orchestration and management layers, such as network management or application management. The 3GPP-defined management system interacts with ETSI NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) system to realize the resource management for virtualized Core Network (CN), virtualized Radio Access Network (RAN) and network slicing. 

More specifically, in the NFV Release 3, an external touchpoint between the NFV’s Network Service and network slicing was defined - in which the Network Service becomes a composite element of the 3GPP SA5 network slice subnet construct - enabling market implementations to easily combine the 3GPP SA5 Network Resource Model (NRM) with the ETSI NFV Information Model.