Emerging use-cases like smart manufacturing and smart cities pose challenges in terms of latency, which cannot be satisfied by traditional centralized infrastructure. Edge networks, which bring computational capacity closer to the users/clients, are a promising solution for supporting these critical low latency services. Different from traditional centralized networks, the edge is distributed by nature and is usually equipped with limited compute capacity. This creates a complex network to handle, subject to failures of different natures, that requires novel solutions to work in practice. To reduce complexity, edge application technology enablers, advanced infrastructure and application orchestration techniques need to be in place where AI and ML are key players.

ANIARA (https://www.celticnext.eu/project-ai-net) attempts to enhance edge architectures for smart manufacturing and cities. AI automation, orchestrated lightweight containers, and efficient power usage are key components of this three-year project. Edge infrastructure, virtualization, and containerization in future telecom systems enable new and more demanding use cases for telecom operators and industrial verticals. Increased service flexibility adds complexity that must be addressed with novel management and orchestration systems. To address this, ANIARA will provide en-ablers and solutions for services in the domains of smart cities and manufacturing deployed and operated at the network edge(s). © 2021 Owner/Author.

In dynamic networks with diverse application requirements, Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles enable application-aware in-operation planning. Project ACINO built a network orchestrator as the connecting component between network applications and the underlying network infrastructure.

Intent-based Software-Defined Networking can automate mapping of customer services to transport services. We demonstrate this using a multi-layer orchestrator that provisions a complex customer service over an IP/Optical testbed.

Through network function virtualization (NFV), telecom providers aim to flexibly re-use generic-purpose hardware to provide services on-demand and in an agile way. Service function chaining is becoming the preferred model to describe the characteristics of the packet-processing network functions which, together, form these services. NFV allows for network function embedding freedom, creating new dynamics between providers and the users requesting services. Users want this freedom to optimise the performance of their requested services, while providers aim to optimise their resource cost with it. This trade-off is heavily influenced by how the available infrastructure is exposed to the users. In this paper, we present an infrastructure abstraction model for network, compute and storage resources that exposes the infrastructure in an abstracted manner. We use this abstraction to propose a solution for the placement freedom trade-off problem by studying its relation with metrics that capture both the user's and the provider's aspects. We conclude with a heuristic that determines the right abstraction for particular scenarios.

The demonstration presents the first implementation of a resource negotiation scheme between users and a network for the provisioning of application-aware connectivity services. This active interaction enables the users, who request connectivity services with multiple application requirements, to select an alternative solution when the network does not have enough resources to satisfy the original requests.

Application-centric networking is a novel approach to construct transport networks that allows application-specific requirements to be taken into account through the entire service provisioning process: the service offered to each application is differentiated at each layer of the transport network, from IP to optical. This approach replaces the grooming of traffic with different requirements into a shared path in the transport layer, and allows for a finer control and utilization of network resources by network operators. To make this concept viable, an interface for requesting a connectivity service by applications requires an abstraction with respect to the various underlying network technologies. Interfaces based on the concept of Intents provide such an abstraction: applications can describe what they need from the network (their requirements) rather than how to achieve them. This paper describes the design and implementation of the solution we propose: DISMI, the Intent-based North-Bound Interface of a network controller.

We demonstrate multi-layer encrypted service provisioning via the ACINO orchestrator. ACINO combines a novel intent interface with an ONOS-based SDN orchestrator to facilitate encrypted services at IP, Ethernet and optical network layers.

In this paper, we present our efforts for integrating network control and network planning, connecting the popular open-source ONOS control platform with Net2Plan, an open source network planner. The integration allows ONOS to use Net2Plan, combined with our resource allocation framework, as an on-line network optimization tool, calculating and re-routing paths as new requests arrive. It also lets Net2Plan obtain an up-to-date topology from ONOS. Net2Plan can then use the topology and our algorithms to perform planning operations such as investigating hypothetical questions about consequences of network failures or additional network equipment. The interface also lets the paths computed by the algorithms running on Net2Plan to be transferred to ONOS and implemented in the running network. While we currently only support IP/Optical networks, additional layers could easily be incorporated. As an interesting side-effect, code used for network simulation can be instrumented and applied to the real network.

5G mobile communication systems will need to accommodate a variety of use-cases, resulting in a diverse set of requirements. To meet these requirements, 5G systems take advantage of modern virtualization possibilities offered by Network Function Virtualization (NFV), enabling deployment agility and dynamicity of virtualized network functions. With the transformation of telecom towards virtualized environments, advanced observability possibilities gain increasing importance as one of the essential prerequisites, especially for successful DevOps operations. However, deployment agility also puts specific requirements on monitoring solutions in order to adapt automatically and continuously to frequent changes in service deployments. In this short-paper, we establish and discuss essential properties of observability systems for virtual network functions in a 5G context. We take these properties as guiding design principles for our software-defined monitoring framework and outline how to evolve our existing components towards a flexible, scalable, and programmable observability solution for microservice-based NFV with features for increased manageability.