The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has launched two projects that further the open source movement for carrier and private enterprise 5G networks with functionality tied to public clouds.
SD-Core, an open source project for building a 5G/4G disaggregated mobile core optimized for emerging private 5G and enterprise use cases, starts with a pre-integrated dual-mode control plane. The SD-Core control plane simultaneously supports 5G standalone (SA), 5G non-standalone (NSA) and 4G/LTE deployments, thus optimizing for flexibility and future-proofing networks.
It leverages components of the free5GC and ONF OMEC projects, and builds on this with refactoring to add cloud-native capabilities for scale-out, resiliency, multi-cloud agility and SaaS deployment APIs. SD-Core is further structured to allow a single control plane to work with many user plane instances, thus optimizing for edge cloud deployments and for delivering enterprise private 5G from a common core running in the public cloud.
SD-Fabric, an open source, P4-programmable hybrid cloud network fabric with the power to push customized packet processing deep into networking elements. Think of SD-Fabric as a cloud-managed, full stack, programmable network fabric for edge applications for Industry 4.0 powered by 5G. SD-Fabric can be deployed as-a-service, and exposes northbound APIs to enable developers to request advanced capabilities of the network such as load balancing, in-band telemetry, custom protocol processing, etc. SD-Fabric provides a full complement of classic connectivity functionality (such as L2, L3, Multicast and ACLs). Hosts and applications require no modification to run on SD-Fabric, but the network is designed and controlled by SDN applications running on the edge cloud by ONOS rather than in embedded software running on all the individual switches in the network. This greatly simplifies the running of the network, and provides opportunities for the applications and the network to all be controlled by the same CI/CD DevOps stack by the same set of developers.
