5G Development and validation platform for global industry-specific network services and Apps

Project Information

5GTANGO

Grant agreement ID: 761493

DOI

10.3030/761493

Project closed

EC signature date 2 June 2017

Start date 1 June 2017

End date 31 January 2020

Funded under

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

Total cost

€ 8 920 139,38

EU contribution

€ 6 983 507,00

Coordinated by

ATOS SPAIN SA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 5GTANGO (5G Development and validation platform for global industry-specific network services and Apps)

Reporting period: 2018-07-01 to 2020-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Telecom Operators are currently evolving their networks to support the 5th Generation of telecommunication networks (5G), which will bring a wide variety of new and innovative services and applications to all European citizens. However, 5G means a change with respect to how networks are conceived. Network infrastructures are being virtualized towards the so called Software Networks, where technologies like Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) are key.

5GTANGO has addressed the flexible programmability of 5G networks and, in particular, the validation and verification of Network Services (NS) in multivendor environments, by delivering an integrated NFV Platform that covers the whole lifecycle of the innovative and complex Network Services to be deployed over the future 5G networks, from development to operations, but without forgetting the automatic validation and verification of those services, one of the main innovations introduced by the project. Core objectives included:
• Reduce time-to-market of NSs by shortening their service development cycle and by qualifying those to be adopted.
• Enable new business opportunities with the customization and adaptation of the network to vertical application´s requirements.
• Reduce the entry barrier to 3rd party developers and support the creation of NSs.
• Accelerate the NFV uptake in industry via an 'extended' Development and Operation (DevOps) model and the validation at scale of the 5GTANGO Platform capabilities in vertical show cases.

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

5GTANGO has delivered an integrated NFV Service Platform, which includes:
a) A Service Development Kit (SDK) to facilitate developers the creation of innovative NSs and applications;
b) A Validation and Verification (V&V) Platform that facilitates the automatic testing of these NSs in “quasi-production” environments before being deployed in a real network. It targets Network Operators and/or Third-party Organisations that may provide services for the certification of these new Services.
c) A Service Platform with an innovative Management and Orchestration (MANO) solution that allows the efficient orchestration of the available infrastructure resources and the control of the whole life cycle and expected performance of the NSs. It is oriented to Network Operators.

Each of these modules corresponds to one of the main stages of the life cycle of a service: development, testing and operation. 5GTANGO allows the implementation of an extended DevOps (Development-Operations) model for Telecom that enables the agile management of the complete lifecycle of NS, increasing the productivity, reducing the time to market of services and allowing the creation of an ecosystem to encourage collaboration and innovation.

5GTANGO results have been delivered under Apache 2.0 license in a public GitHub repository, freely available for download and use. The latest software release, SONATA 5.1 was delivered by the project in January 2020. A huge effort has been made in order to facilitate adoption, which includes high quality documentation, easy installation processes, technical support, etc.

5GTANGO system have been demonstrated in three vertical pilots, with different but complementary requirements:

• Smart manufacturing, which goals was to design a novel, agile and flexible network for a modern factory making use of NFV/SDN technologies. It also focused on how analysing the data coming from the machines in order to improve different processes in the factory with the goal, for example, of improving the efficiency.

• Immersive media, that showcases how to provide advanced multimedia services making use of new technologies like 5G, vCDN, VR, 360° video cameras, image recognition, etc. It focuses on streaming a real-time video using a 360° camera at 4K resolution to users that, for example sitting at the leisure of their home, can enjoy a fully live immersive experience on a variety of devices such as VR head mounted displays, desktops or smartphones. The live stream is also enriched adding multiple secondary streams that can be selected by the user and even with social media (YouTube and Twitter) content. This enables high personalization of the live stream creating a unique experience.

• Real-time communications, which goal is to deploy a commercial operator real-time unified communication platform over an NFV architecture. Each instance of a collaboration system for real-time communications is deployed on each Network Slice, with different QoS requirements, which are enforced though a Transport network, using WAN Infrastructure Manager (WIM) interface.

This guarantees that 5GTANGO has a sufficiently generic approach to fulfill a large variety of scenarios.

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 5GTANGO´s programmability model and SDK are an entry point into the telecom market, as simplifies the creation of complex network services, contributing to lower the barrier to entry into the Telecom market to new developers, including SMEs. The 5GTANGO V&V Platform also widens the market as it opens the door to a wider variety of partners guaranteeing the minimum of quality required by network operators in the new and innovative 5G network services; it also enables network operators to give them controlled access to real or virtual network resources.

On the other hand, one of the drivers influencing the 5G networks is the customization towards industry verticals. In the 5G context, industry verticals will be able to offer services directly to their customers. This opens the door to new scenarios, new products and new market segments. Diverse business models among these verticals suggest opportunities for IT partnerships to adapt 5G solutions to their sector, empowering these companies in their own field (as opposed to purely horizontal solutions. The 5GTANGO Service Platform makes possible for Service Providers to fully exploit the available network resources in an efficient way and to efficiently fulfil the vertical customers service requirements.

5GTANGO provides and end-to-end ecosystem that helps to open the telecom market to new players, encouraging the creation and growth of start-ups in the sector. It enables the NFV value proposition of service agility as it stresses communication, collaboration and integration between developers and operations professionals, shortening the development cycles and the time to market.

Many activities have been done to create impact with the project results. 5GTANGO results have been extensively spread through the project publications and presence in events, international conferences and workshops. Especially fruitful has been the project contribution to Open Source communities and Standards, with the inclusion, for example, of the 5GTANGO slicing solution in OSM release FIVE, and contributions to some of the most salient standards such as ETSI NFV, ETSI ZSM or IETF/IRTF. The project activity related to 5G PPP collaboration has been quite relevant with participation several in Working Groups and collaboration with other projects like Matilda, 5GinFire, NGPaaS or 5G-MoNArch. We can even claim the use of some 5GTANGO results by some of them like 5G-MEDIA, 5G-TRANSFORMER, 5GCroCo, 5G-VINNI, 5G-EVE, RESISTO or 5GROWTH.

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