ETSI

The European standards institute behind NFV / MANO and zero-touch service management, and a founding partner of 3GPP.

ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, is a formal standards body: founded in 1988, recognised by the European Union, and one of the seven organisational partners of 3GPP. ETSI wrote GSM itself, before 3GPP existed; since 1998 the UMTS, LTE and 5G specifications have been produced in 3GPP and published in Europe as ETSI standards. Its remit is ICT broadly, and its standards are free to download. It works through technical committees and, for fast-moving topics, Industry Specification Groups (ISGs) that produce specifications outside the slower formal process.

Two of those ISGs shaped the OSS of the last decade. NFV (2012) defined how network functions run as software and how they are managed — the MANO stack that module 6 describes. ZSM (2017) set the reference architecture for zero-touch, closed-loop network and service management, one of the two neutral references — alongside TM Forum's Autonomous Networks levels — that "autonomous network" programmes are measured against. Beyond those, ETSI's MEC group defines multi-access edge computing, and TC CYBER produces security standards that regulators cite. An architect meets ETSI as the source of the vocabulary — NFVO, VNFM, VIM, management domain, closed loop — rather than as a supplier of anything to install.

ETSITechnical standard

ETSI NFV (MANO)

What is it?

The Network Functions Virtualisation specifications from ETSI's NFV Industry Specification Group, begun in 2012: the NFVI (the virtualised infrastructure), VNFs running on it (container-based since Release 4 — what the industry calls CNFs), and the Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack — NFV Orchestrator, VNF Manager and Virtualised Infrastructure Manager — that deploys and scales them.

What problem does it solve?

Lets network functions run as software on commodity infrastructure with a standard way to deploy, scale and heal them, instead of as fixed-function appliances.

What does it cover?

•The NFV architectural framework and its reference points
•MANO: NFVO, VNFM and VIM roles and interfaces
•Descriptors (VNFD, NSD) and packaging for onboarding network functions
•Evolution towards cloud-native network functions and container infrastructure

What does it NOT cover?

•Not a service-level orchestration framework — MANO orchestrates network functions and ETSI-defined Network Services (chains of VNFs), not customer-facing services.
•Does not define the BSS/OSS above it; how an NFVO is driven by a service order is a TM Forum question.

Where does it fit?

NetworkInfrastructureNetworkCloudOSS

When would an architect use this?

•Designing the mobile core or edge as virtualised or cloud-native functions
•Placing MANO relative to SOM, ROM and the domain orchestrators
•Evaluating a telco cloud platform

Related frameworks

Where you'll meet it in the Academy

ETSITechnical standard

ETSI ZSM (Zero-touch network & Service Management)

What is it?

ETSI's Industry Specification Group for automating network and service management end to end: a reference architecture in which each management domain exposes its capabilities through standard interfaces, and closed loops — observe, analyse, decide, act — run within and across domains without a human in the path.