Xu Lei, senior engineer and Cloud Management Group leader of China Unicom Research Institute introduced China Unicom's development in open source of SDN and NFV at China SDN/NFV Industry Development Conference 2017.

The standardization matures, the overall structure and landing standards gradually improve. Mr. Xu said China Unicom has always been active in the open source community, deploying world's first SDN IPRAN Bureau based on ONOS in 2015, joining the CORD project and leading the research of E-CORD in 2016 and researching and developing the cloud platform security services based on ODL controller.

China Unicom joined the OpenStack community in 2017 and has made a lot of contributions as a gold member.

Looking forward to the future, the company aims to focus on the collaboration of open source R&D and standard work, add self contribution to the OpenStack community and conduct some validation and evaluation of NFV on the live network in 2018; in 2019 it will offer a combination of business capabilities to promote the network layout and commercial trials.

He also noted the traditional cloud platform relies on the OpenStack platform which can't meet the carrier level requirements in performance and stability. "Thus China Unicom has been making efforts on R&D of the carrier level cloud platform to achieve the capability of 99.999 percent carrier level", He added, "We have adopted lots of open source technologies including base technologies like DPDK in the network architecture community."

According to Mr. Xu, China Unicom has been making a push for the standard and open source of SDN/NFV and sending the open-source results to the international standard organization.