What is CORD?

The traditional central office network, like the rest of the legacy telco network, imposes tough challenges on service providers: operational inefficiency, high maintenance costs, and little opportunity to offer user-centric services.

CORD, developed by ON.Lab in collaboration with a global community of partners, intends to address this challenge.

CORD transforms the traditional central office by capitalizing on the benefits of NFV, SDN, and open source software to bring innovative services to customers.

ON.Lab’s partners for the CORD project include Tier 1 network operators, as well as industry-leading vendors like Ciena. Since CORD was unveiled in 2015, it has experienced significant momentum and adoption among service providers actively collaborating and accelerating its development for use in their production networks.

CORD capitalizes on the benefits of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and cloud open-source software and uses commoditized hardware building blocks to bring the economics and agility of a cloud data center to the service provider central office. Importantly, residential, enterprise, and mobile customers benefit from services that are delivered faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Blue Planet’s Role

CORD is one of the primary use cases for the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), an open-source SDN controller for service providers and other mission-critical networks. It is enabled by a hardened, commercial-grade version of the ONOS—Blue Planet ONOS (BP ONOS)—along with Blue Planet’s multi-domain and NFV service orchestration solutions to control and orchestrate white box-based switching fabrics at the central office.

By using Blue Planet, CORD is backed by Ciena’s world-class software service, support, and development resources. CORD also takes advantage of Ciena’s significant cumulative software expertise working with the open-source community.