The MEF has released a new white paper, Third Network Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Vision, that identifies the essential service orchestration and management capabilities necessary to accelerate the communication’s industry shift toward dynamic “Third Network” services.
The Third Network paradigm is characterized by agile and assured connectivity services that are orchestrated over more automated and interconnected networks powered by Carrier Ethernet 2.0, LSO, SDN, and NFV. These new communications services promise to offer a cloud-centric experience with unprecedented levels of user control over network resources, with connectivity orchestrated between both physical and virtual service endpoints and across multiple providers.
In collaboration with other industry standards organizations as part of the UNITE program, the MEF currently is defining LSO capabilities and supporting APIs to streamline and automate the entire network service lifecycle in a sustainable fashion. LSO encompasses all network domains that require coordinated end-to-end management and control to deliver on-demand connectivity services and to assure their overall quality and security.
As explained in the new LSO white paper, the MEF is defining functional requirements and APIs that support capabilities for fulfillment, control, performance, assurance, usage, security, analytics, and policy across multi-operator networks. This approach overcomes existing complexity by defining service abstractions that hide the complexity of underlying technologies and network layers from the applications and users of the services.
“The convergence of LTE, Cloud, SDN, and NFV has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of services over interconnected networks, but it demands end-to-end service orchestration. This is why LSO is a key focus for the MEF in 2015. It is critical to the development of the Third Network Vision,” Nan Chen, president of the MEF, said.
The Third Network Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Vision white paper follows the release of the landmark MEF Third Network Vision & Strategy white paper in November 2014. These are the first of several planned papers and reports related to the Third Network and LSO that will be published throughout the coming year.
