Designed and executed by Altice Labs in collaboration with four FP7 T-NOVA project partners: HPE (Italy), Italtel (Italy), ATOS (Spain) and Demokritos (Greece), the ETSI PoC#40 (Proof of Concept) "VNFaaS with end-to-end full service orchestration" was concluded successfully. Overall, the proof of concept aimed to demonstrate the dynamic instantiation of virtualized network functions on demand, according to the “VNF as a Service” (VNFaaS) paradigm, in an end-to-end perspective, including the integration of WAN connectivity, which is one of the most important NFV use cases, for the clear advantages to operators and customers.

Thanks to the VNFaaS concept, functions traditionally supported by physical equipment (gateways, proxies, firewalls, transcoders, traffic analyzers, etc.) can be offered "on demand", in a logic similar to that of Cloud services. This eliminates the need to acquire, install and maintain specialized hardware at the customer's premises, reducing the initial investment and operating cost of the service, and on the other hand, there is a new market and a potential source of revenue for operators.

The PoC was divided into two phases. The first phase was carried out during the "SDN & OpenFlow World Congress" held in The Hague on the 11^th to 14th October 2016 and had as main goal the demonstration of the automatic creation of network services based on VNFs, through the T-NOVA platform, and the use of the Marketplace concept to compose, configure and offer network services to end users.

The second phase of PoC was carried out in conjunction with the final review of the T-NOVA project, with the presence of the European Commission in Athens on the 3^rd March 2017. Using the results already demonstrated as a starting point, the goal of this second phase was to extend the concept to distributed NFV or multi-PoP infrastructure environments.

The scenario demonstrated in the second phase was supported by a distributed infrastructure between Aveiro and Athens and involved the dynamic creation of three virtualised functions - vSA (virtual Security Appliance) in Aveiro, and vTC (virtual Traffic Classifier) ​​and vProxy (virtual Proxy), in Athens.

Detailed information on the goals and methodologies of the ETSI NFV PoCs initiatives can be found at http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/nfv/nfv-poc.

More information on PoC # 40, including the initial proposal and the final report, is available at http://nfvwiki.etsi.org/index.php?title=VNFaaS_with_end-to-end_full_service_orchestration.

Open proof of NFV concepts in Proof of Concept (PoC) helps build industrial awareness and confidence in NFV as a viable technology. PoCs also help develop a diverse and open NFV ecosystem. Under ETSI, PoC results can guide work in the NFV ISG by providing feedback on interoperability and other technical challenges.