cert

The introduction of new players in the Telecom market may require from operators a certification process of services before putting them in production. At this point, the certification companies may make use of the V&V Platform (Verification and Valida-tion Platform) to validate and verify VNFs and NSs through automatic test.

This entity could be a third-party which business focuses on testing services against different Service Platforms; a developer, making use, for example, of a testing service platform that mirrors the operator’s production platform; or the operator itself wanting to test the services before they go to production.

The V&V Platform offers quality assurance, shortens the feedback loops and allows the tests execution planner, reducing the time and cost of test development for entities. 

Compared to the local tests offered by the developer, V&V achieves much more complete tests in environments similar to those of production. These exhaustive tests in a similar environment to production make it possible to improve the quality and reliability of services, which benefits both service developers and service provid-ers, but also leads to a superior experience for the end user. In this way, the V&V tries to avoid mistakes in real environments, offering tests in environments similar to those of production.

Value proposition

Features Value Proposition
Validation and verification of individual VFNs and / or more complex NSs  
  • VNFs/NSs quality assurance based on functional tests (validation) and non-functional tests (verification)
  • Bigger market opportunities for validated/verified VNFs and NSs
  • Guaranteed Quality of Experience for certified services
     
Total flexibility on testing technologies  
  • Test descriptor-based for a flexible, human readable, configuration
  • Container-based test on-boarding
Catalogue of “certified” VNFs / NSs  
  • Reduced NSs development time and costs
  • Encourage collaboration and foster innovation
Decision support recommendations  
  • Timely proposition of suitable, certified VNFs and NSs
  • Bigger market opportunities for validated/verified VNFs and NSs
  • Reduce the testing effort by replacing manual with automatic testing
Catalogue of tests
  • Reduced Tests development time and costs
  • Test evolution through versioning support
  • Generation of different service tests
Multi-platform test support (SONATA, OSM)  
  • Wider applicability of the V&V: operator, V&V provider
  • Enriched set of test results:developer, V&V provider
  • Bigger market opportunities for validated/verified VNFs and NSs: Developer
Extended usability
  • Multiple deployment options what increases the exploitation possibilities in a variety of scenarios and for different purposes
  • Modular approach allows different deployment configurations
  • Support for extensive parallelization of tests execution executed by different stakeholders (V&V ecosystem)
  • Wider applicability of the V&V
Efficient use of resources
  • Highly configurable set-up/tear-down of test environment
  • Possible re-use of test set-ups for multiple executions of the same test
  • Test execution planner
  • Manual reconfiguration of test execution plan
Continuous development and optimization support
  • Shortened feed-back loops
  • Automated deploy of services/collection of results
Convenient presentation of results  
  • Easy to understand and use
  • Showcase for the promotion of VFNs/NSs
Realisation of analysis over the test results
  • Extraction of resource efficiency and elasticity efficiency profiles
  • Identification of insights with regards to correlation of VNF-specific and resource usage metrics
  • Efficient design of automated policies based on the analysis results
Validation and verification of Policies
  • Network and service performance assurance 
  • Improved customer experience