By Andrii Vladyka & Asaf Matatyaou, Harmonic Inc.
Traditionally, the CMTS market was dominated by hardware-based CMTS appliances, with no alternatives available. During the last few years, however, the cable industry took a leap forward and started adopting software-based CMTS solutions. Disruptive benefits, long-term potential and deployment scenarios of such software-based CCAP solutions are analyzed in detail in References 1 and 2, while Reference 3 outlines real-world experiences and lessons learned from deploying virtual CMTS in centralized and distributed access architecture (DAA) environments.
This paper analyzes the background and deployment scenarios of a virtualized CMTS (vCMTS) and considers future development of disaggregated vCMTS from the standpoint of leveraging distributed edge compute. We also explore the notion of cluster multitenancy and its potential deployment scenarios in private, public and hybrid cloud.