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UBITECH undertakes the scientific and technical coordination of the MATILDA Innovation Action on 5G-ready applications orchestration over sliced programmable infrastructure

UBITECH is hosting the kick-off meeting, in Athens, Greece (July 5-6, 2017) of the MATILDA 5G-PPP Innovation Action, officially started on June 1st, 2017 – undertaking the scientific and technical leadership of the research project’s activities. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 761898) and spans on the period June 2017 – November 2019. The MATILDA project aims to deliver a novel holistic 5G end-to-end services operational framework 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. MATILDA aims to 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.

In this context, UBITECH undertakes the scientific and technical lead of the project’s activities, while UBITECH R&D team will heavily contribute and lead the technological choices towards the definition and design of a framework for network-aware applications and network services engineering, orchestration, deployment and continuous management, over dynamically created network slices, facilitating vertical industries to exploit the full potential arisen through the evolvement of 5G ecosystem. Moreover, UBITECH leads the conceptualization of the chainable application component metamodel and the 5G-ready application graph metamodel, considering the representation of the bindings among the exposed and required interfaces per chainable component and the denotation of the networking requirements, as well as the deployment and runtime policy metamodel, allowing the definition of policies over the network-aware application graph and their association with the application chainable components, the integrated VNFs/PNFs or the entire network-aware application graph. Finally, UBITECH drives the implementation of (a) the Chainable Application Component and VNF/PNF Development and Verification Environment that constitutes the web-based IDE, based on Eclipse Che, for supporting collaborative software development, validation and verification processes for chainable application components and VNFs/PNFs; (b) the Deployment and Runtime Policy Editor that is being used for declaration of policies per network-aware application graph, which may consist of multiple expressions and each expression combines several conditions that can trigger multiple actions; (c) the Intelligent Orchestration Mechanisms that include the deployment manager and optimization engine supporting a constraint satisfaction solver and the production of a deployment plan based on a set of high level policies and constraints, a set of data monitoring mechanisms collecting feeds from network and application-level metrics, a set of mechanisms supporting data fusion, production of advanced insights through machine learning mechanisms and real-time profiling of the deployed components, application graphs and VNFs and a context awareness engine supporting inference over the acquired data and supporting runtime policies enforcement; and (d) the Multi-site NFV Orchestrator that is going is to support the deployment and operation of the VNF-FGs embedded within the network-aware application graph, the basic management operations on the instantiated VNFs by communicating with a respective NVFM, and the placement (in cooperation with the Multi-site Virtual Infrastructure Manager) of the set of VNFs/PNFs over the available programmable physical and virtual resources of the infrastructures belonging to different Infrastructure Providers.