26 April 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today announced that it has won the 2016 Transport Network SDN Interoperability Standardization Best Practice Award at the 2017 China SDN/NFV Conference, for its Elastic Network Intelligent Controller (ZENIC) software defined optical network (SDON) solution. The award won at the conference, hosted by the China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance together with the China Institute of Communications, is in recognition of ZTE’s efforts and achievements in transport SDN northbound interface interoperability tests. 

In 2016, the China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance initiated the transport SDN northbound interface interoperability test. ZTE participated in and completed the tests in over two months, complying with all indexes defined in “optical transport network (OTN) based software defined transport network (SDTN) northbound interface specifications V1.0” by China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance. All interfaces between the controllers from different operators and vendors conform to telephony application programming interface (T-API) specifications. Being a key technology in multi-domain interconnection, northbound interface uses mature T-API to reduce complexity, as well as implement interface interoperability and extension, so as to advance the development of transport SDN.

ZTE used OpenDaylight controller ZENIC SDON to complete the test. The OpenDaylight Project is a collaborative open source project at The Linux Foundation that aims to accelerate the adoption of SDN and NFV for a more transparent approach that fosters new innovation and reduces risk. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. ZTE is China’s first OpenDaylight platinum member, and has always been dedicated to promoting SDN/NFV standardisation and commercial deployment. In 2014, ZTE worked with Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF)/Open Networking Foundation (ONF) to accomplish the first SDON interoperability test and in 2015, ZTE commercially deployed with operators. In the future, ZTE will continue to develop better ways of assisting customers in improving network service capability, drive innovation and sustainable development, and accelerate the commercial deployment process.