In the frame of the First International Workshop on Softwarized Infrastructures for 5G and Fog Computing (SOFT5), which takes place today (Friday, September 8, 2017) in Genoa, Italy and is devoted to providing a deep and critical insight on the evolution of 5G networks and cloud/fog computing technologies, researchers from UBITECH and CNIT present a holistic 5G end-to-end services operational framework (called MATILDA) tackling the overall lifecycle of design, development and orchestration of 5G-ready applications and 5G network services over programmable infrastructure, following a unified programmability model and a set of control abstractions.
In particular, Panagiotis Gouvas, Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, Constantinos Vassilakis, Eleni Fotopoulou, George Tsiolis and their co-authors argue that MATILDA will devise and realize a radical shift in the development of software for 5G-ready applications, as well as virtual and physical network functions and network services, through the adoption of a unified programmability model, the definition of proper abstractions and the creation of an open development environment that may be used by application as well as network functions developers.
Intelligent and unified orchestration mechanisms are going to be applied for the automated placement of the 5G-ready applications and the creation and maintenance of the required network slices. Deployment and runtime policies enforcement is provided through a set of optimisation mechanisms providing deployment plans based on high level objectives and a set of mechanisms supporting runtime adaptation of the application components and/or network functions based on policies defined on behalf of a services provider. Multi-site management of the cloud/edge computing and IoT resources is supported by a multi-site virtualized infrastructure manager, while the lifecycle management of the supported Virtual Network Functions Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FGs), as well as a set of network management activities, are provided by a multi-site NFV Orchestrator (NFVO). Network and application-oriented analytics and profiling mechanisms are supported based on real-time as well as a posteriori processing of the collected data from a set of monitoring streams. The developed 5G-ready application components, applications, virtual network functions and application-aware network services are made available for open-source or commercial purposes, re-use and extension through a 5G marketplace.
Download the publication here (PDF).
