Central office re-architected as a data center.

CORD is a new design of a telco central office that replaces closed and proprietary hardware with software running on commodity servers, switches, and access devices. It allows network operators to benefit from both the economies of scale (infrastructure constructed from a few commodity building blocks) and agility (the ability to rapidly deploy and elastically scale services) that commodity cloud providers enjoy today. This article introduces the CORD architecture and describes an open reference implementation of CORD that is available for evaluation.