After 4 years of research, Sprint has released C3PO, an open source platform to improve NFV/SDN efficiency.
From the announcement:
C3PO is an open source NFV- and SDN-based mobile core reference solution designed to significantly improve performance of the network core by providing a streamlined, high-performance data plane for the packet core, tightly coupled to an efficient, scalable SDN controller implementing IETF Forwarding Policy Configuration (FPC).
C3PO runs on standard, off-the-shelf Intel servers and acheives improved efficiency by collapsing multiple network components into a small number of compute cores. The common network components they identified to be collapsed are
- Serving gateway
- Packet gateway
- Deep packet inspection
- Child protection filtering
- Carrier-grade NAT
- Static firewall
- Service function chaining classification (ISC)
From the announcement:
As for next steps at Sprint, we’re now working to harden the C3PO code and extend it to a variety of use cases, including IoT [Internet of Things],” Marquardt said. “As operators scale IoT, low-cost solutions will be vital to drive viable economics when connected devices grow to 10’s and 100’s of billions in number. We believe a commercial version of C3PO to be a potential solution well-targeted for low-cost, large-scale applications such as this.
Read more at Virtualization & Cloud Review.
