Open Networking Foundation Taps Huawei Exec for Mobility Chair

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has brought on board Huawei‘s senior manager for corporate standards to be the chair of the organization’s Wireless and Mobile Working Group.

Serge Manning will lead the new working group, which was created to collect use cases and determine architectural and protocol requirements for extending OpenFlow-based technologies into wireless and mobile domains.

The group plans to collect, merge and refine use cases for software-defined networking (SDN) usage within wireless and mobility networks. According to the ONF, the working group will eventually propose a common ground architectural framework encompassing various elements of OpenFlow-based or -oriented wireless and mobile network domains.

“Serge brings decades of telecommunications experience to his position as chair of our Wireless and Mobile Working Group,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the ONF, in a prepared statement. “His expertise and the work of this new group will be important as we more deeply engage with wireless and mobile operators around the globe. With the exponential growth of mobile data, there is an inherent need to simultaneously operate over multiple wireless technologies. By studying the open SDN requirements of wireless and mobile networks, OpenFlow and related ONF endeavors can be enhanced to bring even greater benefit to this space.”

SDN may be some distance off from mass adoption, but as organizations continue to migrate their networks to this new model, SDN will affect various types of networking. Wireless and mobility will certainly be affected.

“Standards such as OpenFlow are highly applicable to wireless and mobile networks, even though there has not been a wide exploration of the specific needs and requirements of these networks to date. That is why we were created,” Manning said.

Just as Huawei extends itself into a leadership position within an ONF working group, the company is still heavily involved in the privacy wars between itself, Cisco Systems (CSCO) and the U.S. federal government. Company executives deny the security holes that have made headlines in the last few months.