Huawei Debuts Cloud-based BNG Interface Protocol CUSP at IETF Hackathon in Canada

At IETF 102 in Montreal, Huawei participated in the "IETF Hackathon" and conducted an on-site demonstration of the Control Plane and User Plane Separated Protocol (CUSP), an interface protocol for Cloud-based BNG.

The demo not only deepens people's understanding of CUSP, particularly developers working for operators, standards organizations, and in other domains, but it also fully reflects CUSP's concepts of openness and open source, helping operators build better networks.

The Hackathon idea began at the 92nd meeting of IETF in 2015. It aims to optimize and demonstrate the standard solution through on-site code development, to attract more players and improve the industry ecosystem. Hackathon attracted over 200 developers and standards experts from global operators, device vendors, and educational and research institutes this year, including Telefonica, China Mobile, Huawei, Google, and MIT.

The CUSP draft was proposed by Huawei and China Mobile, which defines protocol requirements for information delivery, reliability, and security mechanisms needed for communication between the control and user planes in cloud-based BNG architecture. It is the industry's first dynamic control plane protocol proposed for BNGs.

The CUSP project at the hackathon involved two demonstration scenarios. Connection to the network environment, provided by a Huawei remote lab, allows programming to be performed on the interfaces between the control and user planes of the cloud-based BNG with CU separated architecture, all in accordance with a CUSP draft. As a result, the control plane can control the user plane, with board information, interface status, and user login information on the user plane queried through the control plane. In addition, the control plane can allocate different IP address segments to forwarding devices through CUSP, thereby implementing centralized management and control over address resources, effectively improving resource utilization.

Moving forward, Huawei is accelerating its R&D efforts in the cloud-based BNG solution with CU separated architecture. Huawei also seeks to strengthen its cooperation with global operators to continuously innovate in the cloud domain, promote the formulation of cloud-based standards, and support future transformation towards cloud-based networks.

The fifth Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF 2018) will be held from September 10th to September 11th, 2018, in Geneva, Switzerland. UBBF this year has chosen ‘Intent-Driven Network: Maximize Your Business Value’ as the theme. By focusing on four hot topics ‘Premium Home Broadband, Reshaping User Experience’, ‘Cloud-and-Network Synergy, Enabling New Growth with B2B’, ‘Constructing 5G- and Cloud-based Simplified Networks’, and ‘Working Toward Next-Generation Optical Networks’, this event presents an opportunity to share business innovations and practices of Intent-Driven Network.