ETSI’s Zero touch network and Service Management Industry Specification Group (ZSM ISG), announced in December, had its first meeting last week to elect its leadership and to initiate collaboration with other groups such as standards bodies and open source communities. It also determined the working topics the group will address first.
The group, made up of 40 organizations, elected Klaus Martiny, the senior program manager at Deutsche Telekom, as the chair of the ZSM ISG. Nurit Sprecher, the senior specialist of Nokia’s Siemens Networks, and Christian Toche, Huawei’s head of its France wireless standards department, were chosen as vice chairs.
Additionally, Ashiq Khan, network functions virtualization (NFV) architect and 5G network designer at Docomo, was named chair of the Network Operators Council (NOC), an advisory group to the ZSM ISG. And Serge Manning, Sprint’s senior technology strategist of global standards, was named vice chair of the NOC.
The ZSM ISG agreed on five working topics, including the development of use cases, corresponding network requirements, and the resulting reference architecture with an end-to-end view of a zero touch system. The group will also explore analysis into automation techniques and the management of network slices.
The ZSM ISG, when it formed, said it would take on 5G network management, automation in 5G deployments, and the accompanying technologies — such as network slicing. While the group is beginning with 5G end-to-end network and service management, it will extend this to future networks. The goal remains to automate all network operational processes and tasks.
In December, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Docomo, NTT, Sprint, and Telefónica all contributed to ETSI’s white paper. It outlines the benefit of automating networks and service management, as well as the need for standardization.
The Chair of the NOC of ETSI NFV ISG Don Clark talked to SDxCentral about creating the zero-touch group at the SDN and NFV World Congress event in The Hague in October 2017. He said that the the NFV ISG had laid a foundation for the majority of network virtualization, but that ETSI required a new group to connect service providers’ operations support systems to their virtualized networks.
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