Huawei proposes its programmable vCCAP to address two main challenges: the management complexity for multi-service and multi-access operations under Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) and what the company sees as a big gap between slow network evolution and rapid service innovation requirements.

The philosophy behind the vCCAP is to re-architect the headend as a data center, disaggregate CCAP devices, virtualize CPE and CCAP control and management functions into the cloud and distribute DOCSIS processing to the remote node. As a result, operators can architect the headend with commodity hardware building blocks, use simplified remote nodes and reduce opex, accelerate network innovation, and enable "access network as a service" and "access network function as a service" while enabling a smooth migration to distributed CCAP, says Huawei.