The 5G concept does not only aim at providing higher capacity and lower latency but also at increasing the level of programmability, control and flexibility in order to meet the requirements stemming from innovative use-cases from various vertical sectors. To reduce the time-to-market for novel 5G Network Applications from third party developers, an integrated development and operations (DevOps) methodology is the way to move forward. Furthermore, 5GASP will address the challenges of validation, verification and certification of 5G Network Applications, so that operators are aware of their behaviour before deploying them on their production network. To achieve all the above, 5GASP introduces novel procedures and a novel fully automated toolchain that caters for the production of any Network Application with very little or without any human interaction through OSS automation tools. These novelties shall be demonstrated on top of well-known and mature 5G facilities, 5G services and 5G/NFV experimentation tools to overall offer a DevOps-like and open platform for deploying, validating, verifying and certifying Network Applications.
Building on previous and existing projects such as 5GinFIRE, 5G VINNI, 5G EVE, 5G MOBIX our project intends to make our partners’ testbeds available to SMEs & start-ups seeking to experiment in developing, testing, and validating their innovative Network Applications in a reproducible environment which offers open source tools. Most existing facilities already support various verticals, but 5GASPs’ facilities will be tailored to support Network Applications in an optimized, cross-platform and cross-vertical manner. The 5GASP ecosystem encompasses state of the art testbed that provide various 5G technologies, such as NFV and Virtualization. In terms of Virtualization, both traditional Virtual Machines as well as containerized platforms will be made available. In terms of NFV, all 5GASP testbeds follow the ETSI NFV reference architecture offering the two most-known solutions of OSM and ONAP, while supporting both modelling and packaging according to the ETSI standards OSM/SOL006(YANG model) and ONAP/SOL001(TOSCA). In terms of the overall offered 5G system, 5GASPs’ facilities offer 5G New Radio and 5G Systems supporting both 5GNSA and 5G SA, while various MEC solutions are available. In certain locations there are also dedicated resources (e.g. RSUs, OBUs) that will be tailored for Network Applications’ usage.
Albeit all work done by researchers in previous and ongoing projects, aspects related to inter-domain use-cases as well as security and trust aspects associated with running 3rd party software (Network Applications) in critical network environments such as those associated with the Automotive and PPDR verticals, have not been fully tackled. In 5GASP we will address these issues pragmatically from the viewpoint of the companies developing and deploying their Network Applications, requiring safety for their IPR and from the viewpoint of the network operator which must trust on the correct and limited behaviour of the Network Application in its network. We will investigate the most recent Cooperative ITS standards developed at ISO TC 204 / CEN TC 278 which allows the sharing of data across service domains and spanning multiple networks and will research how to apply them to other verticals. Moreover, in 5GASP we will work with Network Operators in scenarios that actually not only fit from a technical perspective, but also scenarios that do fit the business models of network operators.
Network Operators have an extensive knowledge on Testing and Validation in Communication Networks. They are also aware of the high financial and time costs associated with testing new hardware and software. In the modern world of IT technologies that have very short cycles between development, testing and production, such as 5G Network Applications, automated tools and processes are of high demand for all the proof of concept, acceptance, regression testing and validations processes, keeping costs relatively low and yet having access to certification processes. In 5GASP we want to provide the blueprints for everyone in the Network Application ecosystem, enabling the setup of automated testing of Network Applications. Of course, not all vertical-specific testing processes can be automated given the limited resources of this project, , but it is our project goal to provide documentation in the form of public guidelines and best practises to assist third parties to build on our work to achieve their own specific goals.
5GASP plans the development of software tools that can assist the 5G Network Application developers in building Continuous Integrations frameworks, targeted at their specific vertical, consisting mostly out of OSS tools and producing reports that can be used to start certification processes. These open tools are a strict requirement of our previous objective and are vital to the success of creating a Network Applications ecosystem built around SME’s. Our proposal is to innovate through new DevOps and testing tools, emulation of vertical environments for performance testing, stress testing of Automotive and PPDR Network Applications under realistic loads and validation of inter-operability between different 5G infrastructure providers (e.g. OSM vs ONAP).
The socialization of Network Applications developers is of outmost importance in the success of our ecosystem. Only through a tight support community, built upon trust and information sharing, can SMEs and start-ups find the proper documentation and a number of open source reference Network Applications to achieve their commercial goals in this new ‘softwarized’ 5G business market. It is our goal to promote tighter and seamless integrated methodologies between community tools, and the development/testing mechanisms developed within 5GASP. Community Building play an important role in the foreseen outcomes of the project, as we intend that this open community can outlive the project duration and maintain the developed tools in future to come.
A key innovation of our project is the creation of a marketplace portal (Network Application Store) that aggregates Network Applications from several SME’s or any other Network Application developer in a single location curated by the Network Applications Community. The portal will include information of tests/validations which Network Applications have successfully passed as well as testbeds and Network Operators that have successfully deployed the Network Application. The purpose of this portal is to promote the SME’s and their respective Network Applications as well as the platforms and operators that support them. Furthermore, this portal has the potential to be marketed in a way similar in to stores for mobile apps, such as Apples App Store and Google Play. The business model based on a Network Application Store assumes that SMEs and start-ups developing Network Applications can offer their tested and certified products, which can be deployed in minutes, to service providers and other users and developers who will leverage by employing these reusable network applications in their business. Business models will be developed and validated aiming to the sustainability of the 5GASP business solution. The business planning process shall cover the entire value chain identifying the stakeholders for each step of the chain. This involves: (i) the identification of points of exploitation in the system, (ii) the definition of different billing/costing (revenue streams) models to the end users and (iii) reimbursement models to the Network Application creators and/or experimental infrastructure providers.