UBITECH participates at the kick off meeting of the 5GTANGO 5G-PPP research project (co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020, with Grant Agreement H2020-761493), which takes place on June 21-22, 2017 at Barcelona, Spain. UBITECH teams up with a consortium of seventeen organizations across Europe, bringing together large industries, telecom companies, vendors, research institutes, universities and verticals, including ATOS, NEC, NOKIA, Altice Labs, Telefonica and Huawei, to put forth the flexible programmability of 5G networks so as to reduce time to market for networked services by shortening service development cycle and by qualifying network services to be adopted, to reduce entry barrier to third party developers and to support the creation and composition of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and application elements as “network services”.
In particular, 5GTANGO implements an integrated vendor-independent platform that comprises i) a NFV-enabled Service Development Kit (SDK), ii) a Store Platform with advanced validation and verification mechanisms for VNFs/Network Services qualification (including 3rd party contributions), and iii) a modular Service Platform with an innovative orchestrator in order to bridge the gap between business needs and network operational management systems. The outcome of the SDK that is a packaged NFV forwarding graph of composed services, is automatically tested and validated in the Store for their posterior deployment with a customizable orchestrator compatible with common existing Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM) and SDN controllers in the market. The combination of the SDK, the validation Store and the service platform realises an extended multi-modal NFV DevOps model between service developers, telecom operators and vertical industries, increasing operational efficiency, facilitating the implementation and validation of new services and accelerating the adoption of NFV technologies.
Within 5GTANGO, UBITECH’s R&D team contributes significantly in the conceptualization, definition and implementation of the core verification and validation functions to be applied to the VNFs/NS in the overall qualification process, incorporating a set of verification tests, such as network service descriptors check (NSD, grammar, consistency, etc.), library dependences (with external elements in other catalogues), integrity of service package (secured signed) and configuration check, as well as a set of validation tests, like deployment checks, features’ compatibility check, the features’ scalability check, stress tests to check stability, long runs for reliability, etc. Moreover, UBITECH heavily contributes in the detailed design and construction of a scalable data store enabling storage of VNFs/NS in an optimum way in terms of efficiency, scalability and fault-tolerance. In the same context, UBITECH implements the mechanism that creates and manages all metadata and policies templates associated to VNFs/NSs in qualification incorporating conditions, requirements, constraints, attributes including QoS parameters indicated by the developer or any deployment constrains imposed by operator (i.e. OSS) in the SLAs. Finally, UBITECH is enhancing the Service Platform by designing and implementing robust modules that truly makes the 5GTANGO Service Platform a highly-reliable carrier-grade component of any large eco-system – adapting the NFVI infrastructure on top of which the Service Platform will work, in order to achieve the desired level of service in terms of performance and reliability.
