In the first reporting period, the 6Green Project has been able to achieve preliminary outcomes on all the foreseen objectives. Here is a brief summary of the work performed so far:
- Development of cloud-native enablers (more notably, microservice architectures and service meshes) for end-to-end management and automation including scale-to-zero.
- Development of a Metal Convergence Layer (MetalCL) and an NFV Convergence Layer (NFVCL) for the bootstrap and management and terraforming of cloud-native VIMs, and for the lifecycle management of different network ecosystems (5GS, overlays, etc.), respectively, as well as preliminary development of ML-powered lifecycle management mechanisms for network slicing policies are able to satisfy multi-criteria trade-offs (minimize deployment costs and resource wastes, maximize revenue, etc.).
- Traffic offloading mechanisms for supporting the Green Elasticity paradigm, including NEF functionalities for allowing third parties to request traffic steering, along with the investigation of several UPF solutions providing different trade-offs between performance and consumption to be part of the Green Elasticity mechanisms.
- Implementation of a multi-stakeholder observability and analytics framework, which combines the collection of data coming from both the infrastructure and the network with policies used for extracting KPIs or for simulating resources usage.
- Definition of an extended 5/6G green SBA, including a general description of the NFs composing it, highlighting the added features (if referring to a 3GPP function), its block diagram, its functional requirements and provided services.
- Conception of Decarbonization Level Agreements (DLAs) that include energy and carbon footprint considerations in the business models established among the involved stakeholders.
- Identification of the roles, interests, and the potential impact of green business models for the various stakeholders involved in the 5/6G ecosystem, and preliminary design of such models to ensure the appeal and economic viability of then project’s outcomes.
- First design of the 6Green VAO for ensuring energy-aware, seamless integration and interoperability between application and network orchestration layers, along with a preliminary definition of the operations to be supported by the VAO for Day-0/1/2/N and the identification of the policies to be specified in the SLAs/DLAs and preliminary examples provided for scaling operations.
- Initial preparation of the 6Green testbeds, including the main facility located in Genoa, Italy, as well as satellite testbeds made available by several partners for additional capabilities and including a deployment of the NFVCL and MetalCL for managing the infrastructure in an automated and customizable fashion.
- Definition of the 6Green evaluation framework, including component-level evaluation, SBA frameworks and performance evaluation, and evolution of the requirements for the use cases along with the progress on the 6Green SBA.
