What is ONF? What does ONF Do?

Projects & Initiatives by Open Networking Foundation (ONF)

Sunku R
4 min readDec 5, 2021

The mission of Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is to transform access and edge networks by cross collaboration between academia and industry to build next generation mobile and broadband infrastructure.

Figure 1 : ONF Projects

ONF provides solutions leveraging disaggregated and white box hardware, open-source software for SDN, NFV and cloud technologies. Figure 1 indicates current set of ONF Focus projects at the time of writing this post. A brief description of these projects is provided below. ONF also provides set of reference designs leveraging these projects to build a deployable platform.

VOLTHA

Figure 2: VOLTHA Component Diagram

Virtual OLT Hardware Abstraction (VOLTHA) is a project transforming broadband infrastructure by providing a common, vendor agnostic, GPON control and management system, for a set of white-box and vendor-specific Passive Optical Newtork (PON) hardware devices using open-source software. Highlights of VOLTHA, as indicated in Figure 2 below:

  • Makes an access network look like an abstract programmable switch
  • Works with legacy as…

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