5G-CORAL is an ambitious project aiming to develop and showcase a three-tier (Fog, MEC, and Cloud) integrated 5G Edge platform in a two years framework. For this reason, during the first year, the project has combined development an design tasks; developing Proof-of-concept prototypes quickly after the initial design has been done, to refine the architecture of the solution. Work Package (WP) 1 is in charge of defining the set of use cases and scenarios to be used to challenge the architecture of the system. WP1 is also in charge of designing the baseline architecture of 5G-CORAL, which will be continuously refined based on the implementation experience gained. The 5G-CORAL platform relies on a distributed set of physical resources, possibly from different administrative domains, which are integrated to create a common virtualization infrastructure residing in the Fog/MEC/Edge simultaneously. This infrastructure is called the Edge and Fog Computing System (EFS) and is the main subject of Work Package 2 (WP2), which also deals with the definition of the Services, Functions, and Applications to be deployed on top of the EFS. The brain in charge of controlling, building, integrating and controlling the lifecycle of the virtual functions/applications deployed in the EFS, is the Orchestration and Control System (OCS), developed in Work Package 3 (WP3). 5G-CORAL aims at prototyping and showcasing the 5G Edge platform in several test sites located in Taiwan (Shopping Mall, High-speed Train) and Europe (Automotive). The development and installation of each test-site, together with the integration of all components into specific use cases is performed in Work Package 4 (WP4).
During the project, there have been fundamental advances in the development of a Fog based architecture compatible with ETSI MEC, defining its main building blocks and interfaces. This architecture substantially departs from previous work and has been validated, obtaining several figures of merit which prove its validity. The 5G-CORAL architecture's main characteristic is its flexibility, able to adapt from fully centralized scenarios to fully distributed. It is also able to operate under different orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, OSM or forCes, a fully distributed orchestrator developed in the project.
The 5G-CORAL platform has been validated with real use cases including i) Multi-RAT GW, ii) 360 Video streaming, iii) Edge Robotics, iv) SD-WAN, v) High-Speed trains and vi) Automotive scenario.
