The Broadband Forum announced the second issue of Technical Report-459: Multi-Service Disaggregated BNG with CUPS.
“TR-459 Issue 2 includes an additional layer of flexibility to manage subscriber resiliency, simplifying operations and streamlining provisioning and maintenance,” said Jonathan Newton, Co-Director of the Access and Transport Architecture Work Area at Broadband Forum from Vodafone.
Any faults that can cause network outages can be navigated around as the new specification enables the brain of the network (known as the Control Plane, responsible for managing interactions with the customer home router) to intelligently determine whether a switchover to a new User Plane is needed. The User Plane carries network traffic and enforces policies such as Quality of Service (QoS).
“The latest release of the TR-459 standard will continue to drive standards-based interoperability between vendors, with Broadband Forum simplifying network transformation and ensuring more agility and flexibility for broadband operators,” said Craig Thomas, Vice President Strategic Marketing and Business Development at Broadband Forum. “Our work on a Multi-Service Disaggregated Broadband Network Gateway (DBNG) continues to make it easier to deliver fixed broadband services quickly to new and existing customers as the industry continues to transition and offers a migration path from legacy infrastructures to a future agile cloud native approach.”
Standardization of the Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) for a Multi-Service DBNG enables the Control Plane from one vendor to control and manage the User Plane from another vendor. This builds a more diverse supply chain with a greater choice of Control and User Planes from different vendors leveraging the TR-459 standard.
Broadband Forum members showcased the important capabilities enabled by TR-459 Issue 2 as part of the CloudCO Demonstration at Network X 2022. The demo highlighted Subscriber Group Resiliency and switchover, and DBNG-User Plane traffic steering. The network monitored the subscriber traffic SLAs and when the SLAs were not being met, switched the subscribers to the backup DBNG-User Plane. Subscriber Group Resiliency minimizes network outages during any network faults.
