Introduction

While studying Communication in BE, I never had the slightest clue of exactly how the Networking aspects of the Communications Fields are being managed. How service providers can provide services to people who have spread across miles and miles away from the cities and cover the entire population of a Country. Now in my current role, I got to learn more about magic which makes it all work.

I recently got an opportunity to work with the telecommunications side of the business which helped me to understand, how a Telco Company can connect to every people on the Continent. I will try my best to share what I have learned through the medium of my Website.

To Understand Networking and its Shift we need to understand, How the Backend of the Network used to work in the Old Days.

Traditionally the Telecommunication Equipment used by Various vendors was Proprietary Hardware with Integrated Software. These Products were termed Carrier Grade because of their Reliability. While this Hardware was reliable, they were seeing the challenge of not being able to be involved with the growing needs of the Telecommunication Industry.

In order to sustain the growing needs of the Industry few telecommunication giants like AT&T, BT, Orange, Telstra, etc came up with a White Paper at a conference in Germany, which talks about a New Concept that will decouple the Hardware and Software Portion of the device which was earlier being sold as a bundle. This transformation got the name ” NFV “Network Function Virtualization”.

This White Paper is Available at the ETSI Website:  http://portal.etsi.org/NFV/NFV_White_Paper.pdf .

Now you all will wonder what is ETSI. Well ETSI is European Telecommunications Standards Institute. This is an Independent, Non-Profit organization that works for Standardization in the field of Communication. ETSI develops standards in key global technologies such as GSM™, TETRA, 3G, 4G, 5G, and DECT™.

Benefits of Network Function Virtualization:

• It has greatly reduced the cost and power consumption through the consolidation of pieces of equipment.
• This has increased the speed for Time to Market as it’s very easy to deploy new devices and now we don’t need to wait for the procurement of the proprietary devices before scaling.
• The scaling operation has become very easy as multiple instances of the same devices can be deployed with High Availability. 
• It’s now easy for Telco Providers to provide services to any geographical region of the world.
• It’s easy for Telco Providers to now integrate devices from multiple vendors which was a challenge and a source of monopoly for the Equipment provider earlier.
• With the Current Technology, we can make a Virtualized Environment that can be considered as a Carrier Grade.  

Source: http://portal.etsi.org/NFV/NFV_White_Paper.pdf .

Software-Defined Networking:

This shift in the Telco world is made possible because of the revolution in the Networking Domain with the Introduction of Software Defined Networking. Though it’s possible to perform NFV without SDN combining them greatly improves the product.

As per Wiki:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing than traditional network management. SDN is meant to address the fact that the static architecture of traditional networks is decentralized and complex while current networks require more flexibility and easy troubleshooting. SDN attempts to centralize network intelligence in one network component by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets (data plane) from the routing process (control plane). The control plane consists of one or more controllers, which are considered the brains of the SDN network where the whole intelligence is incorporated. However, intelligent centralization has its own drawbacks when it comes to security, scalability, and elasticity and this is the main issue of SDN.

Because of this is now possible to Virtualize Routers, Switches, Firewalls, and much more. This has given NFV a Space to Grow.

In the Next Article, we will talk about VNF in more detail.