Liam Fallon

Background

About Liam Fallon

I am a practitioner working on delivering Network Automation in open source. I am helping to build the software frameworks that we need to realize the promise of real automation (especially closed loop automation) in modern telecommunication systems. In my long career at Ericsson, I have architected, designed, and implemented a variety of systems, one of which was the first packet analyzer for the venerable Ericsson AXE switch. From there moved to work on management of Ericsson's ATM switches (a connection tracing system), and onto mobile network management (a number of systems including a batch job management system, a session tracing system, and a complex event processing system). I believe that system architects and designers should follow their designs, and should be involved in the implementation and deployment of their designs so I have led the implementation teams for most of the systems I have designed. In my time in Applied Research, I was looking at how we could apply analytics, policy, and advanced modelling techniques to the problem of automated and especially closed loop management. During that time, I led the development of the APEX adaptive policy engine, which Ericsson contributed to the Linux Foundation ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) project. I followed APEX into the ONAP project and into the Open Source world, and have been working on that project since 2018. I worked on the design and implementation of the new model driven Policy Framework architecture that was developed in the Dublin to Frankfurt releases of ONAP. This work demonstrates how collaborations between partners in open source can work well to achieve a common goal. I am also an active member of the Control Loop subcommittee and I am leading the implementation of the TOSCA Defined Control Loop PoC being executed in the ONAP Guilin release. I am also one of Ericsson’s most prolific contributors of code to ONAP. The Telecommunications industry has been discussing automated management for decades. Now, with soft on demand networking reaching right out to the edges, automated management is an idea whose time has come. We need automated management and we have the technologies (Analytics, AI, ML, Policy, advanced modelling.) and the horsepower to deliver it. My goal is to contribute to engineering the open source frameworks that will deliver this promise for Telecommunications.