The Nordic IT services and software company Tieto is contributing to the market introduction of Facebook’s open source initiative, Open/R. The goal of Open/R is to become the foundation for an ecosystem of open source solutions to enable next generation network services and architectures that would pave the roads towards digitalization. 

As businesses are becoming more and more digital and consumers’ usage of rich digital content is accelerating, the complexity of the underlying communication network is increasing as the flow of information grows.

To remove some of the existing constraints, Facebook developed Open/R as an extensible distributed network application platform in order to prototype and deploy new network applications much more quickly and reliably than previously possible, covering a wide variety of network domains and designs.

As an extendable IP routing platform, Open/R allows for faster, more agile and cost efficient introduction of new protocols, application and services, solving the flexibility and extendability shortcomings of other well established routing protocols (such as e.g. OSPF). 

“The backbone of consumer, but also business services, is becoming more and more application centric. Digitalization is very much about the need for more rapid introduction of new applications and distributed applications,” says Tom Leskinen, Head of Product Development Services, Tieto. “Facebook is always looking to the future, and they have identified the need to enable a more efficient and speedy way to run distributed applications. This is required for the improved Internet connectivity that is at the heart of digitalization.”

Tieto, with its extensive experience in the telecom industry and strong background in network architecture, routing and switching technologies, collaborated with Facebook to validate Open/R in real life scenarios for network operators and services providers.

In the carried pilots, Open/R demonstrated its capability to adapt the routing topology according to various dynamic link parameters, using more intelligent load balancing routing algorithms, support for high automation and off-the-shelf deployment for self-configuring, and auto-generated global Ipv6 addresses. It has proved very suitable for ad-hoc networks consisting of largely autonomous routing devices. 

With Facebook's announcement to Open Source Open/R platform, it will be possible to adapt and tune the routing logic, metrics and other parameters to meet current and future demands, beyond what can be obtained with traditional OSPF.

As part of the collaboration, Tieto engineers are working with Facebook and the Open/R ecosystem to expand the market adoption among network operators and services providers by providing advisory, development and system integration services to enable smooth integration of Open/R community version into customer specific platforms and support thereof. 

“Tieto’s wireless and network experience and expertise helps showcase Open/R as a technology from which the telecom industry could benefit. In addition to helping Facebook identify additional functionalities, we are also helping them to build an ecosystem for open source projects. This is something that we believe in, and in which we gladly participate,” Leskinen says. 

As part of driving next generation network architectures, Tieto is also a member of the Facebook initiated Telecom Infra Project, an engineering-focused initiative driven by operators, suppliers, developers, integrators, and startups to disaggregate the traditional network deployment approach.

Tieto Product Development Services enable semiconductor, connected device and communication infrastructure vendors build next generation IoT, Mobile & wearable devices, Connected car and Networks. Together with alliance partners, we deliver complete chipset, software and services solutions for 5G, IoT and automotive.  Tieto's Product Development Services is a trusted Technology development and Systems Integration partner for Telecom industry for over 20 years.