A HOLISTIC, INNOVATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR THE DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND ORCHESTRATION OF 5G-READY APPLICATIONS AND NETWORK SERVICES OVER SLICED PROGRAMMABLE INFRASTRUCTURE

Project Information

MATILDA

Grant agreement ID: 761898

DOI

10.3030/761898

Project closed

EC signature date 2 June 2017

Start date 1 June 2017

End date 31 July 2020

Funded under

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

Total cost

€ 8 325 083,88

EU contribution

€ 6 664 458,75

Coordinated by

CONSORZIO NAZIONALE INTERUNIVERSITARIO PER LE TELECOMUNICAZIONI
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MATILDA (A HOLISTIC, INNOVATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR THE DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND ORCHESTRATION OF 5G-READY APPLICATIONS AND NETWORK SERVICES OVER SLICED PROGRAMMABLE INFRASTRUCTURE)

Reporting period: 2018-09-01 to 2020-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

MATILDA's aim has been to devise and realize a radical shift in 5G-ready vertical applications, by providing the tools to foster and speed up the extension/evolution of the “cloud” paradigm to the 5G ecosystem, intrinsically bridging the application and the network service domains. In more detail, in a vision that foresees a stronger integration of cloud and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) environments, MATILDA has recognised and conformed to the ongoing developments, by providing clear interfaces toward the multi-site management of cloud/edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT) resources, supported by a multi-site virtualized infrastructure manager. Based on this paradigm, it supports the creation and maintenance of 5G-ready applications through the selection of their service components and the generation of their own Forwarding Graphs, along with the lifecycle management of the required network slices, by properly interacting (through the Operations Support System – OSS) with the multi-site Network Functions Virtualization Orchestrator (NFVO) residing in the Network Providers’ domain. Network- and application-oriented analytics and profiling mechanisms are supported based on both real-time and a posteriori processing of the collected data from a set of monitoring streams. To achieve these goals, intelligent, unified and hierarchical orchestration mechanisms are applied for the automated placement of the 5G-ready applications and the creation and maintenance of their network slice instantiations. The concept of slice intention allows the application-level orchestrator to request, negotiate, deploy, maintain and discontinue the proper application-aware slice instantiation, tailored to the specific application’s needs, by also providing a set of mechanisms for runtime adaptation of the application components and/or network functions, based on policies defined on behalf of the services’ provider.
As an Innovation Action, another major goal of MATILDA has been to prove the effectiveness of its proposed mechanisms and architectural choices in a set of 5G-ready demonstration test beds based on real vertical-industry use cases, which have been implemented in a distributed test bench environment. In summary, the most impactful project outcomes have been: i) the implementation of a sound architectural framework and of the related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), optimization mechanisms and software to support real 5G-ready applications in their creation and deployment, through the interaction between the Vertical Application Orchestrator (VAO) and the NFVO, in an environment suitable for both application developers and Network Service Providers; ii) the demonstration of the platform's capabilities on a number of significant use 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

MATILDA has introduced a set of novel concepts, including the design and development of 5G-ready applications -based on cloud-native/micro-service development principles- the separation of concerns among the orchestration of the developed applications and the required network services that support them, as well as the specification and management of network slices that are application-aware and can lead to optimal application execution. In the last reporting period, the project has achieved the completion of all the elements of the three architectural layers that contribute to the MATILDA platform; namely, the Development Environment and Marketplace, the 5G-ready Vertical Application Orchestrator (VAO) and the Programmable 5G Infrastructure Slicing and Management (OSS-NFVO). Moreover, it has demonstrated the capabilities and potentiality of this architecture upon a number of use cases, including High Resolution Media on Demand Vertical with Smart Retail Venues’ Integration (5GPACE), Testing 4.0 - Distributed System Testing, 5G Emergency Infrastructure with SLA Enforcement (5GPPDR), Industry 4.0 Smart Factory – Inter and Intra-Enterprise Integration, and Smart City Intelligent Lighting System. The results of the project have been presented in international venues, organized webinars, white papers, participation in conferences and exhibitions, panels, standardisation committees' meetings (67 events in total), publications in international journals, international conference proceedings and book chapters (52 total publications). Exploitable products, among others, are the VAO, the OSS-NFVO and the end-to-end orchestration platform.

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 MATILDA architecture provides a contribution to bridge the gap between application-level orchestration and the Network Providers’ mechanisms that have to guarantee end-to-end connectivity, making applications network-aware – to the sole extent needed by their requirements – and, at the same time, making the network application-aware.
The architecture is divided into three distinct layers; namely, a) Development Environment and Marketplace, b) 5G-ready Application Orchestrator and b) Programmable 5G Infrastructure Slicing and Management. In a nutshell, the development environment is responsible to package a cloud-native component in a proper format, so as to be usable by the Control Plane architectural components. Beyond that, the combination of the components in the form of complex graphs is performed by editors that are provided in this layer. Cloud-native components and application graphs are persisted in a marketplace, so as to be searchable by developers. On the other hand, the logically centralized service mesh control plane is the layer that is in charge of the orchestration, monitoring and policy enforcement of a 5G-ready application. The MATILDA programmable 5G infrastructure slicing and management is the interface toward the Network Operators’ domain for the specification of configuration and management information of all underlying resources based on the requirements of the active policy.
Application developers will be requested to deal only with the application graph metamodel; notwithstanding this, they should be aware of capabilities offered by the 5G network layer in terms of connectivity and added-value services, obviously without being bothered by the knowledge of the architectural and implementation details of this offering. This is in line with the “as-a-Service” paradigm but, for the the 5G concept to really make a difference, it is required that this network awareness goes beyond the datacentre-confined vision intrinsic in the cloud environment to embrace the end-to-end 5G-enhanced capabilities, to permit the shift from cloud-native to truly 5G-ready applications. In this respect, the description of the networking requirements of the application needs to be specified only in terms of requested KPIs and constraints; likewise, the capabilities exposed by the network must match the same representational constructs. MATILDA has been devised with the ambition to provide the necessary tools to achieve these goals, which, on one hand, can contribute to ease the task of micro-service based cloud-native application developers and, on the other hand, can enhance the capabilities of Network Service Operators, particularly the small ones, in their market opportunities.

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