Programmable edge-to-cloud virtualization fabric for the 5G Media industry

Project Information

5G-MEDIA

Grant agreement ID: 761699

DOI

10.3030/761699

Project closed

EC signature date 2 June 2017

Start date 1 June 2017

End date 29 February 2020

Funded under

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

Total cost

€ 7 742 308,76

EU contribution

€ 6 128 531,14

Coordinated by

ENGINEERING - INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 5G-MEDIA (Programmable edge-to-cloud virtualization fabric for the 5G Media industry)

Reporting period: 2018-07-01 to 2020-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Media-based applications are amongst the most demanding services in terms of bandwidth and latency to enable high audio-visual quality and interactivity. The 5G-MEDIA project has worked in the design and implementation of a platform that supports the media services lifecycle management providing a holistic solution encompassing mechanisms and tools for the development, testing and continuously optimized deployment of media services. The key innovations of the platform lie in the following: i) the offering of a Service Development Kit, encompassing tools for the media service validation and emulation as well as for the testing of optimization algorithms in emulation environment and the continuous corrective sizing of resources required after the media service deployment; ii) the development of two auxiliary services, the 5G-MEDIA Service Catalogue and the AAA mechanisms facilitating the media service management as well as accounting and billing mechanisms; iii) the introduction of a multi-hierarchical cognitive network optimizer catering for the continuous optimization of media services during and after service deployment and iv) the enablement of traditional as well as serverless orchestration allowing event-driven orchestration of services at run time.

The platform has been validated against three media use cases: immersive Virtual Reality 3D gaming application, remote production of broadcast content incorporating user generated contents, and dynamically adaptive CDNs for the intelligent distribution of UHD content.

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

"As a final outcome, 5G-MEDIA provides a platform that is able to deliver a technical solution for media service management across the service lifecycle that have been extensively tested against different use cases in the media vertical.

The building blocks of the 5G-MEDIA architecture are shown in the “5G-MEDIA Architecture” figure attached:

* The 5G-MEDIA SDK is a sandbox where the service developers can develop, emulate and test their NFV-based services, combining both development and operational aspects. First, the SDK provides a Web UI validator tool for NSD. Using the 5G-MEDIA Service Catalogue NBI, the validated descriptors are onboarded to the private catalogue. Then, 5G-MEDIA SDK Emulator allows the execution of real network functions (as Docker containers) in emulated network topologies running on the developer's machine. One step further, the benchmarking service supports load-testing under several resource constraints on VNFs that are deployed on the emulation environment. Then, the developer can onboard services to public catalogue that makes the services ready to be instantiated. The 5G-MEDIA SDK also offers support for the life-cycle management of the services deployed in the SVP with tools such as i) the CNO Training tool facilitating developer in configuring a training model based on reinforcement learning and testing its training performance and ii) the SVP Runtime Advisor, which gives feedback to the developer on how the services are working in the operational environment. The SDK constitutes a toolkit supporting continuous corrective service development throughout the service lifecycle.

* The Service Virtualization Platform consists of four main components:

** The 5G-MEDIA service MAPE relies on monitoring mechanisms to retrieve static data from NFVIs, such as the available computing and network resources, and dynamic data relevant to the execution of the services. Moreover, 5G-MEDIA defines application-specific metrics, relevant to media use cases for quantifying the Quality of Experience (QoE). To this purpose, the platform deploys a QoE probe as a VNF close to the end user, which provides a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) through a statistical model fed by Non-Referenced (NR) video metrics. On top of the monitoring services, the 5G-MEDIA Service MAPE provides a two-level optimization that can be generalized to different hierarchical models, depending on the distribution of resources and the control layer scheme. The two-level optimization of 5G-MEDIA platform ensures that both local and global optimal solutions are considered.
** The 5G-MEDIA Service Orchestration encompasses traditional VNF orchestration as well as serverless FaaS VNF orchestration. The concept of serverless VIM is extended to serverless Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM), and serverless Service Orchestration resulting in a full serverless management and orchestration stack in the Service Virtualization Platform. This stack is interoperable with OSM and complements its functionality allowing to unleash the full potential of a serverless computing paradigm for media applications.
** The 5G Apps and Services Catalogue is a repository of heterogeneous media applications, functions and service descriptors based on a generic and unified standard format, such as VNF Descriptor (VNFD) and NS Descriptor (NSD) data models.
** the AAA portal that provides a centralised and simplified view to administrators about resource utilisation and the associated costs for services running on the platform.

The 5G-MEDIA consortium has gained traction in Europe as one of the frontrunners in the use of 5G capabilities to boost a vertical market such as the media one. Key dissemination results (also in D7.6) are:
* 23 technical publications in journals and peer-reviewed conferences
* Participation in 54 events, including some of international relevance (i.e. EuCNC 2017, NEM Summit 2017, IEEE Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB) 2018, EuCNC 2018, Mobile World Congress 2019, EuCNC 2019, IBC2019 and FITCE 2019)
* Organisation of the workshop “Media delivery innovations using flexible network models in 5G” within the IEEE BMSB 2018
* Contribution to 5G PPP outcomes such as:
** 5G PPP European 5G Annual Journal 2018 and 2019
** 5G PPP WG White Papers “From Webscale to Telco, the Cloud Native Journey”, ""5G Architecture WG White Paper v3.0"", ""Verticals in the Cloud-Native Era""
* Contribution to ETSI white paper “Developing Software for Multi-Access Edge Computing
* An audience of 1400+ followers in Twitter, 421+ followers in LinkedIn and 26000+ views of project website
* produced 15 videos"

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)

5G-MEDIA innovations have been demonstrated through three use cases that has been documented in D6.2 D6.3 and D6.4:

* Immersive media and Virtual Reality: Tele-Immersive (TI) applications are immersive media network based applications that enable the multi-party real-time interaction of users located in different parts of the globe, by placing them inside a shared virtual world
* Smart Production and User-generated Content: Due to the steadily rising cost pressure, broadcasters are looking for new, low-cost and time-saving production methods, which include participatory and user-generated media in the production
* Ultra High Definition over Content Delivery Network: The focus is on how UHD contents by a Media Service Provider (MSP) can serve users on the go and how the MSP can build media distribution service chains made of software defined media functions to properly serve users attached to the 5G network.

Through D7.7 the exploitation approach in 5G-MEDIA takes into account a market analysis, the individual exploitation plan of each partner, the IPR analysis, the identification and the analysis of the context in which stakeholders operate and, finally, a value chain and potential new stakeholders with the relative Business Model.

5G-MEDIA Architecture