About the Telco Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Director Edition Reference Architecture Guide

This reference architecture guide provides guidance for designing and creating a greenfield Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform by using VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure™ – Cloud Director Edition.

Intended Audience

This guide is intended for telecommunications and solution architects, sales engineers, field consultants, advanced services specialists, and customers who are responsible for the Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) and the NFV environment in which the VNFs run.

Acronyms and Definitions

Table 1. General Acronyms

Abbreviation	Description
BFD	Bidirectional Forwarding Detection, for failure detection on the transport links.
DPDK	Data Plane Development Kit, an Intel-led packet processing acceleration technology.
MTTR	Mean Time to Repair
MTTU	Mean Time to Understand

Table 2. Telco Cloud Infrastructure Acronyms

Abbreviation	Description
CCP	Centralized Control Plane in the VMware NSX-T™ Data Center architecture.
CNF	Cloud Native Network Function, executing within a Kubernetes environment.
LCP	Local Control Plane in the NSX-T Data Center architecture.
MANO	Management and Orchestration components, a term originating from the ETSI NFV architecture framework.
NFV	Network Functions Virtualization
NFVI	Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure
NFVO	Network Functions Virtualization Orchestrator
N-VDS (E)	Enhanced mode when using the NSX-T Data Center N-VDS logical switch. This mode enables DPDK for workload acceleration.
N-VDS (S)	Standard mode when using the NSX-T Data Center N-VDS logical switch.
VIM	Virtualized Infrastructure Manager
VNF	Virtual Network Function, executing in a Virtual Machine (VM).
VNFM	Virtual Network Function Manager

Table 3. Telco Acronyms

Abbreviation	Description
HSS	Home Subscriber Server in the mobile evolved packet core 4G architecture.
MVNO	Mobile Virtual Network Operator
PCRF	Policy and Charging Rules Function, in the mobile evolved packet core 4G architecture.
PGW	Packet Gateway in the mobile evolved packet core 4G architecture.
SGW	Service Gateway in the mobile evolved packet core 4G architecture.
SBC	Session Border Controller used in voice telephone for control and data plane communications between clients.
VPP	Vector Packet Processing