ONF launches new Wireless and Mobile Working Group and appoints Huawei’s Dr. Serge Manning as chair.
We aren’t even through the first month of the year, and already I can tell we are off to a great start in 2014! Part of the great start to the year was this week’s announcement regarding our launch of the newly-formed Wireless and Mobile Working Group (WMWG) and the appointment of Dr. Serge Manning, senior manager of corporate standards at Huawei, as the chair.
The WMWG began as a project in the ONF Market Education Committee (MEC) under the initiative leadership of Christos Kolias of Orange. Christos led the production of a Solutions Brief on SDN for mobile and wireless co-authored with Serge. Interest and motivation from Orange and a number of our other service-provider and vendor members was so strong that we formed an ONF Discussion Group to explore use cases for wireless and mobile network use of open SDN technology. Under Christos’s leadership in partnership with Serge the Wireless and Mobile Discussion Group identified an initial sample of 17 use cases to be addressed, and drafted a charter to become an official technical Working Group. Charters are typically around four or five pages long, but this particular charter ended up being nine pages, not because they lengthened an initial draft but because they shortened it from an astounding 55 pages to focus on the highest-impact use cases first. The demand for further exploration of open SDN technologies for wireless and mobile was undeniable, and so the WMWG was formed. As ONF’s liaison to ETSI NFV, Christos has now been devoting his time to that effort.
Under Serge’s leadership, the WMWG has already identified three major use case categories (each an important grouping) to focus on for 2014: wireless transport networks, cellular access networks, and enterprise networks. The work surrounding these categories will be available to the public shortly. The Working Group is now turning its attention to the architectural frameworks that will encompass different elements of OpenFlow-based or OpenFlow-oriented wireless and mobile network domains, ultimately fostering the adoption of these technologies, encouraging innovative solutions, and improving the speed at which products meet future market demands.
Serge brings over two decades of expertise within the telecommunications industry to the Working Group. Over the years, Serge has held a variety of positions within both the vendor and operator communities, including software development, systems architecture, implementation of technical standards, and technology evaluation. An active ONF participant, Serge contributes to the Market Education Committee (MEC), and he co-authored the aforementioned ONF solution brief titled “OpenFlow® Enabled Mobile and Wireless Networks” that led to the formation of the initial Wireless and Mobile Discussion Group.
With his extensive background and history in the industry, as well as his leadership abilities, we are confident Serge will be a great leader in progressing the Working Group (already numbering over 60 companies and over 260 individuals) to achieve its goals. We are excited to see the valuable contributions that the WMWG produces as ONF engages more with wireless and mobile operators around the globe.
- Dan Pitt, Executive Director
