FREE CASE STUDY

This case study explains Telefónica’s iFUSION strategy to deploy software-defined networking (SDN)-enabled disaggregated transport networks across its operational footprint. It provides a detailed discussion on the key strategy cornerstone (the hierarchical SDN controller) and includes a summary of the implementation and associated benefits at Telefónica Germany, where a partially disaggregated multi-vendor optical network has been deployed using Blue Planet’s Multi-Domain Service Orchestrator (MDSO) as the end-to-end SDN controller for the optical network domain.

Telefónica’s iFUSION strategy is designed to create a highly agile and cost-efficient transport network to support today’s traffic demands, as well as future 5G traffic volumes and use cases, such as network slicing. As part of this strategy, Telefónica introduced an open SDN architecture for the programmatic control of the various transport networks (IP/MPLS, microwave and optical). The hierarchical SDN controller framework is at the heart of this new architecture and consists of an end-to-end multi-domain SDN controller at the upper level, with lower-level multi-vendor SDN controllers in each transport network domain. A variety of open standard southbound interfaces (SBIs) and northbound interfaces (NBIs) are utilized for communication between upper- and lower-level SDN controllers, and with underlying vendor-specific controllers, including the ONF Transport API (T-API) within the optical network and IETF-based standard APIs in the IP/MPLS network.