ONF is pleased to announce the release of VOLTHA™ v2.10 along with an updated ONOS® release (v2.5.6). This is the second interim release between the v2.8 and future v2.11 Long Term Support (LTS) releases.
VOLTHA and ONOS are already deployed in production networks at Deutsche Telekom (DT) Türk Telekom (TT) and several other operators. Trials are also proceeding, as an example in Telecom Italia (TIM). Deployment, trial and test feedback, strong collaboration and ongoing development with these operators continues to enable a tight loop of ever-increasing software quality and feature richness.
VOLTHA v2.10 focused on supporting Fiber to the Building (FTTB) workflow with management, ANCP and subscriber rules installation. Emphasis was also placed on scale, software upgrade and COMBO PON. The collaboration with the Broadband Forum (BBF) yielded contributions to the BBF models to properly integrate VOLTHA with the BAA framework along with a first implementation of a combined solution. Work also continued on porting bug fixes and maintaining the VOLTHA v2.8 LTS release, as per the LTS strategy. The efforts for this release were made possible by a robust and highly collaborative community.
Thanks to the combined effort of Radisys, ADTRAN and ONF, VOLTHA v2.10 support for FTTB has been included across the whole stack, starting from the ONOS olt and mac-learning applications, to the core and adapters. It includes support for DPU management and ANCP traffic with single tagged VLAN swap and subscriber traffic with outer VLAN swap. The feature has also been introduced in BBSIM so it can be tested via an automated robot framework. It has been shown to be working with the ADTRAN DPU and OLT.
Thanks to ONF, the scale numbers of the system have been improved to 4096 subscribers per stack on either 1 or 2 OLTs. At the same time, rolling upgrade capabilities have been implemented and tested - a new capability that requires a huge amount of testing. A special thanks to Girish, Khen and Hardik achieving huge improvements and zero downtime for all scenarios.
Additionally, the PON thanks to ONF COMBO OLT support with proper port ranges (to distinguish on a per technology base) has been coded and tested. In the Openonu adapter, thanks to ADTRAN, the Extended Message support was introduced, significantly reducing the time (by 10x) MIB download and SW software update operations. Extended message support has been parameterized to be disabled by default, and it has been tested with BBSIM, according to ITU-T G.988 Amendment 3 (03/2020). Further hardware tests will be done and required fixes will be applied - any test and report from the community is appreciated.
An extension to better handle unknown MEs has also been introduced thanks to Chip Boling from Tibit and the Openonu brigade led by Holger from Adtran. Now ONUs that report unknown MEs can still be managed by VOLTHA, which simply ignores the MEs and saves them as a un-encoeded string of bytes.
Thanks to ONF and Radisys, ONU delete and automatic rediscovery are also now supported. If you want to delete the ONU it will show up in a completely fresh state. This makes it much cleaner to manage misbehaving ONUs.
Lots of great work came out of the ONF collaboration with the BBF. In particular, thanks to Tim Carey from Nokia; Francisco de Carvhalho from Reply; Rajesh Chundury from Radisys; along with Elia Battiston (Radisys, formerly ONF); BISDEN (Hagen and Jon) and Andrea Campanella from a modeling and implementation perspective. The modeling effort created a mapping of BBF YANG Models and VOLTHA/ONOS northbound APIs, proposing extensions to the BBF device models and layer 2 abstraction models to properly trigger and control VOLTHA. Based on these YANG models, a new Docker container and helm charts have been developed and the code is in open source under ONF. The service offers a NETCONF northbound server with BBF models and notification when the ONU is discovered. The adapter also offers OLT and ONT information via Netconf. All the requests are mapped on the VOLTHA APIs. Work to provision the subscriber via the BBF model is also ongoing. The benefit in all of this you ask? It allows you to control VOLTHA as if it was a BBF-compliant system, without knowing it’s VOLTHA.
The VOLTHA platform’s stability has increased due to bug fixes contributed throughout the stack, from further work on leftover data in ETCD and the ONU after device deletion/restart, by clearing State machines as well. Thanks to the operators' deployments, we found and fixed a few erroneous events with missing information, as well as nil pointer exceptions in several VOLTHA containers and ONOS apps.
The test suite for VOLTHA has been significantly enhanced thanks to ADTRAN, Netsia, TIM and ONF, with new FTTB tests in bbsim and hardware. To ensure no memory leaks are present in the platform, a test with 200 iterations of the device deletion has been added. Why 200? Just to be sure there are no issues. A whole new operator Sanity Test for TIM has been created and contributed and is now running nightly. Extension to the existing suites with ONU delete and rediscovery, mac learning, unknown ME and attributes tests, MIB audit and MDS mismatch tests were done. Finally, the rolling upgrade scenario has been tested and the DMI with the specific ADTRAN adapter has been verified on the ADTRAN olt. We now run a total combination of 1164 tests nightly on physical and virtual pods, between master, 2.9 and 2.8 releases.This is truly a significant accomplishment that enables bugs to be identified quickly and accelerate resolution.
In VOLTHA v2.10 we also certified a brand new white box OLT, the Zyxel SDA3016SS Combo OLT. A complete list of hardware certified under ONF’s Continuous Certification Program with the VOLTHA v2.10 is listed below:
- Edgecore ASGVolt64 GPON OLT
- Edgecore ASXVolt16 XGSPON OLT
- Radisys 3200G GPON OLT
- Radisys 1600G GPON OLT
- Radisys 1600X GPON OLT
- Adtran 6320 Combo OLT
- Zyxel SDA3016SS Combo OLT
- Sercomm FG1000 GPON ONU
- Sercomm Glasfaser GPON ONU (based on FG1000)
- Edgecore 6712-32X Switch
- Edgecore 7712-32X Switch
You can find more details about the v2.10 release in the VOLTHA v2.10 release notes.
A huge thanks goes to all of the people, teams and companies that have participated in the release and work every day to achieve the success of this open source project. None of the results in VOLTHA could be achieved without the dedication, contributions, and expertise of the VOLTHA community, the ONF team and the ONF members and partners.
VOLTHA v2.10 Techinar
ONF will be hosting a virtual VOLTHA v2.10 Techinar on July 7th at 9:00am PDT during which we will provide an in-depth view of the release features and an opportunity for attendees to interact with project experts during a live Q&A.
Register now to join us.
Authors: Andrea Campanella, Girsh Gowdra, Hardik Windlass and Matteo Scandolo
