Periodic Reporting for period 1 - 6Green (Green Technologies for 5/6G Service-Based Architectures)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-06-30
The Fifth-Generation (5G) of radio mobile networks and edge computing technologies are the two key enablers transforming the cloud into a flexible communication and inter-compute continuum, offering the possibility to introduce radically new applications in any vertical industrial domain. Recent studies indicate that the intrinsic distributed and pervasive nature of 5/6G and edge computing are going to cause a noticeable usage and deployment increase of computing resources, increasing the associated infrastructure OpEx and CapEx, and, consequently, their carbon footprint and energy requirements. The rise of edge computing will further affect the infrastructure and its impact on energy consumption and GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions, leading to an edge-cloud continuum composed by a large number of public/private micro/small/medium datacenter. To cope with this problem and to meet sustainable growth targets of both the UN 2030 Agenda and the European Green Deal, the 5/6G continuum needs to rapidly evolve new foundation paradigms specifically addressing energy and carbon footprints of the overall ecosystem.
Under these premises, the 6Green project aims to conceive, design, and realize an innovative service-based and holistic ecosystem able to promote energy efficiency across the whole 5/6G value-chain. The ultimate objective of the project is to enable and to foster 5/6G networks and vertical applications, reducing their carbon footprint by a factor of 10 or more with respect to business-as-usual scenarios.
To achieve this ultimate goal, the project will exploit and extend state-of-the-art cloud-native technologies and the B5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA) with new cross-domain enablers to boost the global ecosystem flexibility, scalability and sustainability, and to make all the 5/6G stakeholders (from the ones acting at the in-frastructure and network platform to vertical industries) into reducing their carbon footprint by becoming integral parts of a win-win green-economy business, and meeting a Decarbonization Service Agreement (DSA).
In 6Green, the intent-based cross-domain interactions among 5/6G stakeholders will permit to achieve a tight proportionality between the dynamic and geographically distributed (mobile) workload produced by vertical ap-plications and network slices, and the energy consumption/carbon footprint induced to the evolved SNS network and computing infrastructure.
Under these premises, the 6Green project aims to conceive, design, and realize an innovative service-based and holistic ecosystem able to promote energy efficiency across the whole 5/6G value-chain. The ultimate objective of the project is to enable and to foster 5/6G networks and vertical applications, reducing their carbon footprint by a factor of 10 or more with respect to business-as-usual scenarios.
To achieve this ultimate goal, the project will exploit and extend state-of-the-art cloud-native technologies and the B5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA) with new cross-domain enablers to boost the global ecosystem flexibility, scalability and sustainability, and to make all the 5/6G stakeholders (from the ones acting at the in-frastructure and network platform to vertical industries) into reducing their carbon footprint by becoming integral parts of a win-win green-economy business, and meeting a Decarbonization Service Agreement (DSA).
In 6Green, the intent-based cross-domain interactions among 5/6G stakeholders will permit to achieve a tight proportionality between the dynamic and geographically distributed (mobile) workload produced by vertical ap-plications and network slices, and the energy consumption/carbon footprint induced to the evolved SNS network and computing infrastructure.
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.
- 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.
As mentioned above, the ultimate impact targeted by the 6Green Project is reducing the carbon footprint of 5/6G networks of more than 10 times with respect to Business-As-Usual (BAU) scenarios. While this objective is extremely challenging to be achieved in a 3-year project, the Consortium is fully committed to their achievement and the initial outcomes over the first reporting period are a testament to this commitment.
6Green is contributing to the reduction of energy and carbon footprint of the evolved 5G network by introducing the innovative concept of Energy-aware Backpressure to propagate energy- and carbon-driven KPIs from the physical infrastructure to the vertical industries. As a result, stakeholders whose virtual resources/services are not traditionally linked to the power consumption they cause will be made aware of their individual footprint; furthermore, they will be incentivized to adopt energy-conscious and environmental-responsible behaviours through green business models and the subscription of a Decarbonization Service Agreement (DSA). Such an ambitious result will only be achieved in the wider context of the European Green Deal roadmap and by ensuring a tight synergy with the other EU-funded projects involved with sustainability.
Regarding the specificextension of the 5G SBA, 6Green aims at evolving the functionality of the current SBA to introduce specific, enhanced management func-tions and control policies, and integrate them with the edge/cloud environment. Such policies will heavily rely on AI and use information on UE/slice mobility patterns, renewable energy availability, and vertical applica-tions to perform Edge Agility and/or Green Elasticity operations for energy/mobility-aware workload redis-tribution. Cross-domain interactions among 5/6G stakeholders will be facilitated by the presence of a SBA ex-posure layer, to coordinate their interactions towards the green economy model and the joint decarbonization targets.
6Green is contributing to the reduction of energy and carbon footprint of the evolved 5G network by introducing the innovative concept of Energy-aware Backpressure to propagate energy- and carbon-driven KPIs from the physical infrastructure to the vertical industries. As a result, stakeholders whose virtual resources/services are not traditionally linked to the power consumption they cause will be made aware of their individual footprint; furthermore, they will be incentivized to adopt energy-conscious and environmental-responsible behaviours through green business models and the subscription of a Decarbonization Service Agreement (DSA). Such an ambitious result will only be achieved in the wider context of the European Green Deal roadmap and by ensuring a tight synergy with the other EU-funded projects involved with sustainability.
Regarding the specificextension of the 5G SBA, 6Green aims at evolving the functionality of the current SBA to introduce specific, enhanced management func-tions and control policies, and integrate them with the edge/cloud environment. Such policies will heavily rely on AI and use information on UE/slice mobility patterns, renewable energy availability, and vertical applica-tions to perform Edge Agility and/or Green Elasticity operations for energy/mobility-aware workload redis-tribution. Cross-domain interactions among 5/6G stakeholders will be facilitated by the presence of a SBA ex-posure layer, to coordinate their interactions towards the green economy model and the joint decarbonization targets.