Request for Stand-Alone Project
This page forms the basis for a Board of Directors (BoD) agreement for new stand-alone projects. The Board of Directors will review the Request Form, with any accompanying documents. Upon agreement to proceed, BBF staff, on behalf of the Board of Directors, will oversee the processing of the necessary legal agreements, procedures, membership rules, setup of software tools, etc.
If you are interested in proposing a new project, please reach out to BBF via info@broadband-forum.org.
Notice: This Form has been prepared to assist the Broadband Forum. It is offered to the BoD as a basis for discussion and is not a binding proposal on the author(s), parent companies or any other company. The information is provided "as is" with no warrantees of any kind. Information presented in this document is subject to change after further study. The author reserves the right to add, amend or withdraw any and all statements made herein. |
Directions:
To submit a request for a new stand-alone project, copy this page by clicking the "..." menu button at the top right, then "Copy". Publish your new page with a title of the format: "Request for Stand-Alone Project: [Title and Acronym]".
Item | Details and description |
Title | CloudCO-App SDK (CAS) |
| Type of project |
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| Project description | Introduction: The introduction of SW-defined access networking has created an eco-system that is beneficial to multi-vendor interoperability across data, control and management plane, thanks to the BBF standardization and OB projects, such as OB-BAA. Focus of BBF specification work in access domain -and associated OB-BAA activities- was and is (still) mainly on multi-vendor network function disaggregation, virtualization and control. Lately, big data analytics based on AI/ML technologies are being introduced to enhance the efficiency of controlling and operating networks, and where even autonomous networking may well be conceivable to become a reality in the next decade. The BBF Automated Intelligent Management (AIM) project in CloudCO project stream has standardised a general framework description and architecture for such automated access network management based on closed loops and where AIM modeling functions (MF) play a decisive role in optimizing the network (TR-436). The first version of the AIM interface specification is about to be released as TR-486. Existing work (if any): Cloud infrastructure & utility software market today is abundant with various products and services. While it’s good to have options, for individual AIM application developer it would be an overhead to make choices for each apps they develop. Also, divergent choices across apps would mean the hosting infrastructure would need have the superset of all these pre-requisites making it complex, resource intensive and difficult to maintain. Project prerequisites: TR.436 introduces Automated and Intelligent Management (AIM), to empower management and control functionalities and processes with automation capabilities based on intelligent decision making. The AIM framework encompasses various degrees of intelligence including AI/ML, to help Network Operators and Service Providers operating and managing their network and services by enabling and improving automation, optimization and promptness of processes. With Automation, Optimization and Promptness requirements/challenges is not same for any two operators, it becomes pertinent to realize each use-case as “Value Added Services/Applications”. Key requirements for such applications would be
Should be encapsulated as much as possible from vendor/technology specifics Project roles: The CloudCO-App SDK project will follow the same Agile based development methodology similar to other OB projects (e.g., OB-BAA). The story team is expected to be primarily driven by operator community while the development team will be driven by vendor community. The story team is expected to meet periodically and come up with the requirements for project. This includes new use-cases requiring sample applications, new services required in app sdk etc. The development team will undertake the design & development under AppSDK project to realize the requirements identified by story team. They will follow Agile methodology of developing with periodic sprints and demonstrating the capabilities to story team for approval. Project manager will be responsible for coordinating the overall project |
Project scope/phases | CloudCO-App SDK project attempts to define an open source environment through which management applications ( for example AIM MFs DEs) can interact with management reference platform service in a CloudCO network context.
Objective of this environment is to lower the threshold for application developers to embed their SW app in an CloudCO/access management environment, with minimum dependency on the access controller / Infrastructure specifics.
The open source environment could be created in BBF as a reference CloudCO-App platform with associated SDK/APIs blueprint, as follows:
The proposal also includes developing couple of sample apps showcasing the usage of the CloudCO-App SDK and also realizing a use-case (e.g. Alarm correlation, Network inventory) |
| Business need(s) and opportunities |
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| Business impact(s) (check as many as applicable) |
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| Savings (if applicable) |
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| Audience (check as many as applicable) | Industry:
Role:
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| Deliverable type(s) (check as many as applicable) | National/International institutions:
Media:
Type:
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| Relationship to BBF strategy (e.g., Ultra-fast, Agile, Valuable) | Network automation, Agile: Creation of valuable open source implementations through swift development methodologies which mainly serves the aim of an Agile and autonomous or semi-autonomous network. |
Related BBF documents/projects | OB-BAA, TR-384 TR-436, WT-486 |
Related project dependencies from and proposed interactions with other SDOs/industry forums. Do any of these organizations (or members of ) need to be direct contributors inside the project? | The resulting open source implementation may be readily reused by other open source projects without any additional licensing or IPR restrictions. |
Other special considerations: for non-members, IPP, timing, etc. | |
Target project completion date | 2025 Q1 |
Supporting companies (please indicate if they are not BBF Members): | Nokia, Alticelabs, Outsys, Vodafone |
Approval:
Project name:
Initiation date:
Leadership:
IPP:
Scope of Work:
Project deliverables:
Non-BBF members:
Project Charter
| Project description | This OB-CloudCO-App SDK project proposal is about defining and developing in BBF an open platform software environment and associated software development kit (SDK) through which control/management software providers can easily hook in their cloud application running in this open CloudCO management environment. It allows for example to demonstrate AIM by plugging AIM MF apps -containing only core application code, while leveraging common cloud/CloudCO infrastructure services via pre-defined but open APIs. |
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| Technical Proposal/Scope of work | Cloud infrastructure & utility software market today is abundant with various products and services. While it’s good to have options, for individual AIM application developer it would be an overhead to make choices for each apps they develop. Also, divergent choices across apps would mean the hosting infrastructure would need have the superset of all these pre-requisites making it complex, resource intensive and difficult to maintain.
CloudCO-App SDK project attempts to define an open source environment through which management applications ( for example AIM MFs DEs) can interact with management reference platform service in a CloudCO network context.
Objective of this environment is to lower the threshold for application developers to embed their SW app in an CloudCO/access management environment, with minimum dependency on the access controller / Infrastructure specifics.
The open source environment could be created in BBF as a reference CloudCO-App platform with associated SDK/APIs blueprint, as follows:
The proposal also includes developing couple of sample apps showcasing the usage of the CloudCO-App SDK and also realizing a use-case (e.g. Alarm correlation, Network Inventory). |
| Project deliverables | The CloudCO-App SDK project will have following deliverables:
Note that while the project would be under the BBF umbrella, participation in this project would be open to non-members including the current participants in other open source projects. The development environment and best practices will be established by the project team. Also, the software resulting from this project must support easy reuse by other, possibly non-BBF, open source projects. The CAS project will follow a reuse – create philosophy in which existing software under RAND-Z licensing is reused rather than recreated. This is analogous to the approach that was taken for YANG model and OB-BAA SW layer development. |
| IPR | See separate "Broadband Forum Project Participation Agreement" (attached here) |
