The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) was a non-profit

operator Operator may refer to: Mathematics * A symbol indicating a mathematical operation * Logical operator or logical connective in mathematical logic * Operator (mathematics), mapping that acts on elements of a space to produce elements of another sp ...

-led consortium. It used an open source business model aimed at promoting networking through

software-defined networking Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to network management that uses abstraction to enable dynamic and programmatically efficient network configuration to create grouping and segmentation while improving network performance and monit ...

(SDN) and standardizing the

OpenFlow OpenFlow is a communications protocol that gives access to the forwarding plane of a network switch or router (computing), router over the network. Description OpenFlow enables network controllers to determine the path of network packets across ...

protocol and related technologies. The standards-setting and SDN-promotion group was formed out of recognition that

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

will blur the distinctions between computers and networks. The initiative was meant to speed innovation through simple software changes in telecommunications networks, wireless networks, data centers and other networking areas. In December 2023, ONF announced it was merging with the Linux Foundation (LF). Three of ONF's projects - LF Broadband, Aether and P4 - were transferred to the Linux Foundation and would be e subject to a new governance structure. As part of the merger, ONF handed over $5 million in funding to staff and operate their projects.

History

Google's adoption of OpenFlow software was discussed by

Urs Hölzle Urs Hölzle (; born 1964) is a Swiss-American software engineer and technology executive. As Google's eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure, as well as its enginee ...

at a trade show promoting OpenFlow in April, 2012. Hölzle is the chairman ONF's board of directors, serving on the board along with representatives of the other five founding board members plus

NTT Communications is a Japanese telecommunications company owned by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. It operates an international network across over 190 countries and regions, with locations in more than 70 countries and regions. The company has ...

and

Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many internationa ...

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

professor

Nick McKeown Nicholas (Nick) William McKeown FREng, is a Senior Fellow at Intel, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He has also started technology co ...

and U.C. Berkeley professor

Scott Shenker Scott J. Shenker (born January 24, 1956) is an American computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the leader of the Extensible Internet Group at the International Computer Science ...

also serve on the board as founding directors representing themselves.ONF overview
ONF webpage. Retrieved 2014-01-13. The ONF launched a continuous certification program for products and equipment in the telecom and networking space. As part of certification, the Open Compute Project (OCP) is collaborating with ONF in this new program to promote the use of OCP-recognized open hardware in ONF solutions. In 2017 the ONF completed its merger with the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab). The resulting entity retained the ONF name in 2017. In 2018 the ONF established its Technical Leadership Team (TLT). In 2019 the ONF announced the public release of three Reference Designs (RDs): SEBA, Trellis and ODTN. In 2019, the ONF announced that it had combined with P4.org and would be the host for all activities and working groups related to the development of the P4 programming language moving forward. In 2020 T-Mobile Poland Announced with the ONF that it had achieved production roll-out of OMEC, the ONF's Open Source Mobile Evolved Packet Core In 2020 the Open Networking Foundation announced the release of Aether, the first open source platform for 5G, LTE and edge as a cloud services. By June 2020, the ONF grew to over 200 member companies. Member companies include networking-equipment vendors, semiconductor companies, computer companies, software companies, telecom service providers,

hyperscale In computing, hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system. This typically involves the ability to seamlessly provide and add compute, memory, networking, and storage resources to ...

data-center operators, and enterprise users. In 2021, the Open Networking Foundation announced its SD Core project with the goal of building an open source 5G/4G disaggregated mobile core. In 2021, the Open Networking Foundation announced its SD Fabric project addressing Hybrid and Edge cloud. In 2021, the Open Networking Foundation spun out Ananki as a for-profit sister organization to commercialize Aether as a Private 5G service for Industry 4.0 transformation. In 2022, the Open Networking Foundation announced its SD RAN™ project was fully released to open source. In 2022, the Open Networking Foundation announced its Aether™ private 5G project was fully released to open source. In 2023, ONF launched the Sustainable Mobile and RAN Transformation (SMaRT) 5G project which is focused on developing, demonstrating and open sourcing ML-driven, intelligent energy savings solutions for mobile networks. Initial collaborators include Intel, META/TIP, Rimedo Labs and Rutgers WINLAB. More participants are invited to join this community effort. In December 2023, ONF announced it has merged with the Linux Foundation (LF).

References

External links

*{{Official website, name=Open Networking Foundation Technology consortia Organizations established in 2011 501(c)(6) nonprofit organizations