ONF is pleased to announce the release of VOLTHA 2.4. This release features a number of feature, performance and scale enhancements, including:
- VOLTHA 2.4 together with ONOS 2.2.3 is the first release with full support for all 3 operator workflows:
- AT&T’s 1 TCONT- 4 GEMs,
- Deutsche Telekom’s FTTH 1 TCONT- 8 GEMs, and
- Türk Telekom’s Multi-TCONT triple-play workflows.
- Support for whitebox GPON OLTs
- In-band management of remotely-located OLTs
- Improved performance and scale, achieving the MVP 1.0 requirements for production deployments of 2 OLTs with 500 ONUs each
- High availability with ONOS clustering
- Expanded automated-testing, with over 100+ tests run nightly in regression testing jobs across 3 hardware pods, delivering improved stability and robustness.
- Leverages updated versions of key infrastructure components such as HELM 3 and Kubernetes 1.18.
Details
VOLTHA 2.4 marks the introduction of the complete Türk Telekom triple play workflow, with HSIA, VoIP and Multicast services for the same subscriber. Changes across the whole stack were made to achieve this result. A new ONOS 2.2.3 version, released concurrently with VOLTHA 2.4, introduced improvements in groups and multicast capabilities. Two new apps, mcast and igmp-proxy, have been introduced, and changes were made to existing ones, especially olt. On the opposite side of the VOLTHA stack, on the OLT side, a move to BAL API Version 3.4.3.3 contributed required features for the Türk Telekom workflow, bug fixes and performance improvements. The open ONU adapter was also greatly extended for multi T-Cont and Multicast support.
Support for ONOS controller clustering (typically with 3 ONOS instances and 3 Atomix instances) to achieve scale and high availability is included in VOLTHA 2.4. All 7 ONOS applications used with VOLTHA upgraded to work in a clustered setting.
VOLTHA 2.4 also introduces in the upstream code of the openolt agent the capability to manage OLTs through an in-band connection over the NNI port.
Support for multiple OLTs in a single voltha stack has been implemented through the use of different kafka topics and other extensions to the existing codebase.
Robot based tests are also being released for both the Türk Telekom workflow and the In band management features. The tests are introduced in the ONF nightly regression test suite in Jenkins. Other newly introduced tests include dataplane speed verification according to the bandwidth profile requirements. A new family of OLTs, Edgecore ASGVOLT64 GPON, has been introduced in our automated test, alongside Sercomm GPON ONUs. This new combination of hardware is tested with the Deutsche Telekom workflow, 1T8GEM tech profile.
VOLTHA 2.4 also moves the infrastructure over from HELM 2.X to 3.2.4 and from Kubernetes 1.15.X to 1.18.5. With the use of Helm 3 comes the removal of the tiller pod in the deployment cluster. By updating both Kubernetes and Helm to the latest version VOLTHA 2.4 is placed on track for production deployments due to longer support life of the newest versions of the tools, also removing bugs and enhancing security.
For scale and performance, the VOLTHA 2.4 release has achieved tremendous improvements on the numbers the system it is able to support, meeting the MVP 1.0 requirements of 2 OLTs with 500 ONUs. Thanks to the insights and results gained through nightly scale testing jobs executed over the BBSim PON network simulator, a strategy of constant iteration and improvement over the components was executed. Thanks to the performance enhancements and bug fixes introduced in 2.4, a VOLTHA stack is now capable of reliably and consistently discovering 512 ONUs on one OLT and subsequently immediately provisioning all subscribers with flows. Such scale is achieved for both the Deutsche Telekom and AT&T workflows, with the latter comprising more flow operations per subscriber due to the EAPOL and DHCP flows. The key to achieving such a result was step by step improvement of each component that uncovered critical code paths.
With VOLTHA 2.4 ONF also introduced testing for OLT and ONU devices as part of the Continuous Certification Program. The Continuous Certification (CC) Program is integrated directly into the CI/CD development pipeline, providing real-time certification against the latest platform software to meet the fast-evolving needs for certification in the cloud-era. In particular, starting with VOLTHA 2.4 we are continuously certifying, thanks to our nightly testing pipeline, the compliance of Edgecore’s white box OLTs, both GPON (asgvolt64), paired with Sercomm ONUs and XGS-PON (asfvolt16) with the 2.4 release and the master branch code.
We would like to thank everyone in the VOLTHA community, which includes many companies all over the world who have worked hard to achieve this substantial milestone.
Please see the complete release notes here to see a full list of new features and enhancements.
