The SCOPE Alliance was a non-profit and influential Network Equipment provider (NEP) industry group aimed at standardizing "carrier-grade" systems for telecom in the

Information Age The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during ...

. The SCOPE Alliance was founded in January 2006 by a group of NEP's, including Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, and Siemens. In 2007, it added significantly to its membership.

Mission

Carrier Grade Platform Reference Architecture V1

Active between 2006 and 2012, its mission was to enable and promote the availability of open carrier-grade base platforms based on

commercial off-the-shelf Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) products are packaged or canned (ready-made) hardware or software, which are adapted aftermarket to the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of ...

(COTS) hardware/software and

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

building blocks, and promote interoperability between such components. SCOPE wanted to accelerate the deployment of carrier-grade base platforms (CGBP) for service provider applications so that NEP's could use them to build better solutions for their customers. By 2011, SCOPE achieved its aim, having accelerated innovation in carrier-grade communications technology and ATCA, NEPs sell integrated hardware/software systems to carriers, with three

Computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...

supply chains (Hardware, Operating system, and Middleware) with well-established industry groups promoting interoperability between products from different vendors. SCOPE published "profiles" aimed at influencing specification groups to focus on the needs of NEP customers (carriers). While SCOPE's focused on open standards like ATCA and Carrier Grade Linux, there is no reason "Proprietary Supplier" could not adopt the SCOPE standards.

Open Source Achievements

SCOPE's influence on adapting 'Open Standards' for carrier-grade open-source standards and software is summarized in the table:

NFV, SDN, 5G, Cloud transformation Age

SCOPE was also interested in advancing Network virtualization ("As a consortium of NEPs, it is important for SCOPE to address the lack of standardization in the area of virtualization"), publishing white papers on hardware virtualization, and a white paper on Java Virtualization describing "''an environment where high availability Java EE and native application can co-exist and be supervised in the same fashion in a clustered environment''". In 2010 SCOPE organized workshop to discuss the effect of Cloud Computing on traditional Carrier-Grade Platforms and telecom networks, publishing a Cloud Computing white paper in 2011. SCOPE was placed into "hibernation", effectively retired, by NEPs in January 2012. Telecom carriers (NEP customers) wanted direct involvement in driving transformation, so instead, both groups combined forces on

ETSI The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization in the field of information and communications. ETSI supports the development and testing of global technical standard ...

Network function virtualization Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages the IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create and ...

standardization,

Software-defined networking Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing t ...

adoption, and

5G network slicing 5G network slicing is a network architecture that enables the multiplexing of virtualized and independent logical networks on the same physical network infrastructure. Each network slice is an isolated end-to-end network tailored to fulfil diverse ...

initiatives.

Publications

SCOPE published various publications, including the following: * SCOPE: Technical Position Paper (2008). * Virtualization for Carrier-Grade Telecommunications Solution (2008). * Virtualization: State of the Art (2008): focuses on system virtualization. * Virtualization: Use Cases (2008). * Virtualization: Requirements (2008) * CPU Benchmarking Recommendations v1.0 (2009). * Carrier Grade Base Platform (CGBP) (2009): Middleware reference standard. * MW Portability: Use Cases (2009). * JSR 319: Availability Management for Java - Java Community (2010). * Carrier Grade Requirements for Cloud Computing: A SCOPE Alliance Perspective presented to the 2011

OpenSAF OpenSAF (commonly styled SAF, the Service Availability Framework) is an open-source service-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. OpenSAF is consistent with, and expands upon, Service Avai ...

Conference. * Telecom Grade Cloud Computing v1.0, white paper (2011), describing the characteristics of cloud computing usable for carrier-grade services.

References

External links