Secured autonomic traffic management for a Tera of SDN flows

Project Information

TeraFlow

Grant agreement ID: 101015857

DOI

10.3030/101015857

Project closed

EC signature date 16 December 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 30 June 2023

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 5 865 803,75

EU contribution

€ 5 865 803,75

Coordinated by

CENTRE TECNOLOGIC DE TELECOMUNICACIONS DE CATALUNYA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TeraFlow (Secured autonomic traffic management for a Tera of SDN flows)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

TeraFlow has created a new type of secure cloud-native transport SDN controller that will radically advance the state-of-the-art in beyond 5G and 6G networks: ETSI TeraFlowSDN. This new SDN controller is able to integrate with the current NFV and MEC frameworks as well as to provide revolutionary features for both flow management (service layer) and optical/microwave network equipment integration (infrastructure layer), while incorporating security using Machine Learning (ML) and forensic evidence for multi-tenancy based on Distributed Ledgers.
The target pool of stakeholders expands beyond the traditional telecom operators towards edge and hyperscale cloud providers. These actors benefit from TeraFlowSDN by a) exploiting a new type of secure SDN controller based on cloud-native solutions while, b) achieving substantial business agility with novel and highly dynamic network services with zero-touch automation features.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Use cases have been proposed for the TeraFlowSDN controller. They are classified into the following topics: inventory, topology, service, transport network slicing, monitoring, traffic engineering, automation, policy enforcement, ML-based security, distributed ledger and smart contracts, compute integration, and inter-domain. A complete set of requirements for the TeraFlow SDN Controller are introduced. They have been classified as functional and non-functional and they cover the proposed use cases.
We have presented an architecture for the TeraFlowSDN controller. First, we have provided an overall view of the architecture. Secondly, we have presented each detailed component architecture, with a special focus on RPC and data models involved. Finally, we have presented several workflows that involve multiple component interaction.
ETSI TeraFlowSDN has been implemented following the cloud-native architecture concept. The software is divided into microservices that execute specific tasks and collaborate through messages to achieve the end goal for which the software is designed. In TeraFlowSDN, the communication between components is based on gRPC. We have defined different RPC methods and messages and grouped them by microservice. At TeraFlow project ending, the release for ETSI TeraFlowSDN is 2.1.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The TeraFlowSDN architecture has been validated with the following innovations: a) Cloud-Native Architecture; b) Transport Network Integration; c) Unification of Network and Cloud Resource Management; d) ML-based security; and e) Distributed Ledger Technologies. The final demonstrations (TRL 5) have supported three use cases: Autonomous Networks Beyond 5G, Inter-domain, and Cybersecurity.

Logo H2020 TeraFlow