By Jim Huang, Telecom Industry Business Unit, Amazon Web Services; Jeff Finkelstein, Cox Communications
This paper proposes FMA cloudification to advance FMA along its evolutionary path. Many communication service providers (CSP) in the telecommunication industry have recognized Cloud as a mechanism for lowering operator’s total cost of ownership (TCO) and gaining operations efficiency. Some CSPs have started migrating their network infrastructures as well as IT workloads to Cloud. Challenges in supporting virtualized network functions (VNFs) in Cloud are often around real-time constraints, high availability, and operation automation. This is particularly true for DOCSIS like products.[3] Our approach to FMA cloudification is to properly map FMA functions across cloud region, cloud edge, and on-premise environments based on their latency tolerance characteristics and access network technology requirements. Specifically, we allocate FMA control plane functions such as MAC Manager and management plane functions such as Operations Support System (OSS) in the cloud region and control functions of auxiliary cores at the cloud edge, leaving latency-sensitive Remote MAC Devices as well as lastmile access networks AS IS in the field. With this MFA cloud architecture, CSPs can focus their capital and resources on the last-mile technology and deployment into a particular geographic area while simplifying network provisioning and management processes with the cloud.