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The 5GPPP Phase 2 5G-TRANSFORMER projects just finished. One of its main outcomes is a full MANO stack featuring multiple advanced functionalities, such as vertical and network slice management and NFV network service composition and federation. Overall, this allows deploying vertical-tailored slices deployed in multiple administrative domains, each having multiple datacenters interconnected by means of a heterogeneity of transport technologies (incl. mmwave, packet, optical). And more importantly, the system allows an E2E control of resources to comply with SLA requirements no matter where the service components are deployed (at the datacenter or administrative domain levels). Furthermore, different domains may run different core MANO platforms (e.g., OpenSourceMANO, Cloudify), since the 5GT service orchestrator is capable of integrating any such platform through wrappers. In this way, the 5GT advanced functionality can be retained and make it work over new releases of such projects by just adapting the wrapper, hence guaranteeing its survivability.

The code also features GUIs at all layers of the stack for ease of management and visualization of databases and deployed services (incl. network service structure or network service placement). APIs towards placement algorithms have also been developed for easily testing new algorithms without the need for delving deep into the code. Monitoring jobs can also be created by interacting with Prometheus and by reacting based on alerts. Take a look at the documentation to discover all the implemented functionalities. Furthermore, the 5G-TRANSFORMER code will be also maintained and evolved in the follow-up project 5GROWTH. So, stay tuned!

Code is downloadable for free from our github account (https://github.com/5g-transformer). User and developer guides are also available together with the code. Information describing the functionalities offered is available in deliverable D5.5.

The 5G-TRANSFORMER stack leverages on ETSI NFV specifications with enhancements to offer new functionality for the first time (e.g., NFV service composition, NFV network service federation). Its MANO stack is split into three main building blocks. The Vertical Slicer (5GT-VS) is the entry point for the vertical requesting a service and it handles the association of these services with slices as well as network slice management. The Service Orchestrator (5GT-SO) is responsible for end-to-end orchestration of services across multiple domains and for aggregating local and federated (i.e., from peer domains) resources and services and exposing them to the 5GT-VS in a unified way. Finally, the Mobile Transport and Computing Platform (5GT-MTP) provides and manages the virtual and physical IT and network resources on which service components are eventually deployed. It also decides on the abstraction level offered to the 5GT-SO. More information on the overall architecture can be found in Deliverable D1.4.

If you want to see the 5G-TRANSFORMER code and functionality in action, you can watch our multiple demos on our youtube channel (https://goo.gl/uB5TlL ), including advanced vertical-oriented and networking-oriented demos (e.g., automotive service scaling, NFV network service composition, NFV network service federation).

All code available at: https://github.com/5g-transformer
All videos of demos available at: https://goo.gl/uB5TlL
All deliverables are available at: /5g-transformer/deliverables/
All publications are available at: /5g-transformer/dissemination/publications/

The Innovation Radar is an initiative supported by the European Commission focusing on the identification of high potential innovations and the key innovators behind them in Horizon 2020 projects.

5G-Transformer have deployed thirteen innovations presenting exploitation opportunities in and beyond the project lifetime. Among these, four innovations have been identified as the most relevant and submitted to the Innovation Radar process:

• 5G-TRANSFORMER Architecture
• Abstraction Module for Mobile Transport and Computing Platform (5GT-MTP)
• Vertical Slicer
• Service Manager

The following table reports the thirteen innovations including the relevant short descriptions. Each innovation is also associated to at least one owner in the consortium. The owner has identified a market potential in the innovation, possibly in cooperation with other partners of the consortium.

5G-TRANSFORMER Architecture – NEC Novel architecture extending ETSI MANO based on two new functional building blocks, 5GT-VS and 5GT-SO, interworking with the 5GT-MTP extended from H2020 5G-Crosshaul.

Slicing for Vertical Services – Nokia A system allowing the creation of vertical suited slices including integrated fronthaul/backhaul and computing resources (e.g. MEC/Cloud Services), using ETSI NFV NSDs as network slice templates.

MTP Single Logical Point of Contact – Ericsson and Centre Tecnològic Telecomunicacions Catalunya The 5GT-MTP is a novel building block, in the ETSI architecture, that operates as a single logical point of contact and resources orchestrator to manage the combined complexity of transport, radio, and datacenters, and abstracting such resources towards the 5GT-SO. 5GT-MTP manages multi-domain transport, multiple radio split options and multiple VIMs.

5GT-MTP platform for supporting MEC services – EURECOM Integration and deployment of the MEP in an NFV environment at the 5GT-MTP and abstraction of the MEC resources toward the 5GT- SO.

Abstraction Module for 5GT-MTP – Ericsson and Centre Tecnològic Telecomunicacions Catalunya Abstraction functions module allowing to keep scalability and stability of the solution, while guaranteeing the resources optimization, where the resource domains are heterogeneous in technology.

Arbitrator – Politecnico di Torino The arbitrator has the role of prioritizing resources among vertical service instances and mapping them to multiple deployment options.

Translator – Nextworks Usage of translation rules to bridge among the abstract view of verticals and the specific definition of network slices.

Network Slice Manager- B-COM Network Slice Manager, with the use case NSaaS and the management of the network slices.

Vertical Slicer – Nextworks 5GT-VS allows verticals to define their service based on a catalogue of blueprints defined by the service provider or infrastructure operator and mapping them to network slice instances according to SLA requirements.

Service Monitoring Platform – Nexworks Service monitoring platform for providing monitoring services including definition service-specific monitoring metrics and their provision to verticals and mobile network operators. Integration of this service as part of distributed cloud services/MEC.

Enhanced Service Orchestrator for heterogeneous infrastructures Mirantis Enhanced service orchestrator platform able to support heterogeneous technologies like MEC, various cloud infrastructures, including both private and public clouds, integration of cloud and WAN transport technologies by development of the appropriate MEC/WIM/VIM plugins.

Federation – Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo Federation mechanisms between 5G-TRANSFORMER platforms owned by different administrative domains and integration of vertical provided infrastructure through abstraction, advertising and interfaces.

Service Manager – NEC and Centre Tecnològic Telecomunicacions Catalunya The Service Manager is a key building block of the Service Orchestrator. It receives requests by the vertical slicer and takes decisions to best serve them, interacting with the 5GT-MTP to gather available resources data and to provision the network resources selected by the placement algorithm.

Visit Information Radar’s webpage through this link.

Source: CORDIS

An EU initiative has helped demonstrate a personalised 5G automatic system that reduces the time of action and minimises errors in emergency cases.

Read original article here (available in six languages).

• The demonstration shows a personalized 5G 100% automatic system that allows to reduce the time of action in case of an emergency, minimizing errors, which implies a greater survival rate.

• The 5G-based system is made up by the patient’s device that allows monitoring their activity and main vital signs; an evolved center for remote patient monitoring, that facilitates the identification and monitoring of emergencies with augmented reality devices which improve the assistance provided by the medical professionals.

 

Madrid, November 27th, 2019.- 5TONIC, the open research and innovation laboratory on 5G technologies, founded by Telefónica and IMDEA Networks, has presented, together with SAMUR-PC and the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), a new system for situations 5G-based emergency plan, developed under the European innovation project 5G-TRANSFORMER.

The demo shows a 5G 100% automatic system that allows to reduce the time of action and minimize errors, which implies a higher percentage of survival in emergency situations. The system allows personalized attention to have the patient’s medical data such as, among others, the pulse and blood test values. These values ​​are shown in real time to the doctor in 5G augmented reality glasses to facilitate their flow of decisions when attending to the patient. This allows a personalized diagnosis and emergency treatment to be fully customized, since conceptually the system could even have the patient’s medical history at that time.

The application of 5G augmented reality assists the medical personnel attending the emergency in three aspects: on the one hand, it shows you how to get to the geographical position where the patient is, from the place where you can reach with emergency vehicles; second, it shows the patient’s clinical parameters in real time and at the moment when they are necessary to facilitate medical decisions; and finally, it allows sending a video stream taken in situ at the emergency site to remote medical centers to facilitate assistance from other centers or doctors who can help in the specific case. All this is achieved using intelligence on the edge of the network (also known as 5G Edge computing), one of the technologies that will allow 5G to have the precise characteristics to offer services that require a minimum delay and a great transfer of data, as in this case with the augmented reality.

As for technological elements, the system is composed by the smartwatch mobile device that monitors the patient’s constants and connects to a 5G mobile; by a 5G evolved patient monitoring and emergency monitoring center from which the status of patients in whom an alarm has been activated is checked, as well as the status and location of SAMUR-PC emergency equipment and firefighters and from where it is carried out all coordination of the emergency device. Additionally, the ambulances and fire fighters are equipped with technology that allows real-time monitoring of the case and the sanitary professionals to obtain additional valuable information thanks to the augmented reality glasses.

The technology and proof of concept of this 5G-based emergency system has been developed within the European project H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER, coordinated by UC3M, in which Telefonica, SAMUR-PC and Ericsson also participate (together with 14 other institutions of first level). The technology developed includes very relevant aspects for the advancement of 5G, such as the dynamic orchestration of resources, including the automatic deployment of functions in the “edge” and the multi-domain federation between operators.

 “Solutions like this decrease response times. We currently need almost three minutes to handle an emergency call. In the first place, it must be located, codified and prioritized. Then, we select the best resource, mobilize and confirm that it is directed towards the patient. Sometimes, if it is a complicated place of access, additional time is needed to locate it. This technology could save us these three minutes of the process. 23 percent of SAMUR-PC patients who have suffered a cardiorespiratory arrest recover without sequelae. We would like this technology to allow us to increase at least ten percentage points these figures.

5G technology would allow us to have a lot of information before our arrival, such as the patient’s location and clinical data. In addition, we could explore other possibilities such as automatic alerts in certain pathologies such as hypoglycemia, hypoxia situations in respiratory patients, loss of consciousness, etc. All this in relation to the possibilities that 5G offers us to monitor a large number of chronic patients such as heart, hypertensive, respiratory or diabetic patients,” says Javier Quiroga, Head of the Organization Support Division of SAMUR-PC.

“Testing this type of advanced 5G emergency response systems at 5TONIC is essential to validate and demonstrate the advantages that these systems will provide. In the immediate future in which monitoring and health applications for people in mobile phones and smart watches It is increasingly common and advanced, integration with 5G mobile networks and health care systems, enables automation scenarios and emergency coverage never seen before,” explains 5TONIC Vice President Arturo Azcorra, Director of the IMDEA Networks Institute and Professor of the Department of Telematic Engineering of the UC3M.

“5G technology, thanks to its ability to dynamically adapt the network to meet demanding latency and capacity requirements (both in terms of bandwidth and computing), will be able to have a direct impact on society, improving response times to health emergencies .The use of these 5G technologies also makes possible the integration of augmented reality mechanisms, which have a direct and extremely useful application in the case of medicin” affirms the 5G-TRANSFORMER project coordinator, Carlos J. Bernardos, Professor of the Department of Telematic Engineering at UC3M.

What is SAMUR-PC:

SAMUR-Protección Civil  is the municipal emergency and health care service, which provides its services in the city of Madrid. Since its creation in the 90s, it has been in continuous evolution and has become a benchmark in the field of out-of-hospital emergency both nationally and internationally. During this time it has made about three million assists. The cardiorespiratory stops attended, about 350 a year, highlight. Of these, 60% recover pulse and 22% do so without sequelae. Very high percentages compared to those in the European context that are well below these data, between 10% and 15%. SAMUR-PC performs more than 300 daily attentions, with an average arrival time of 8 minutes, thanks to the 22 operating bases spread throughout the city.Sobre la UC3M

 

About UC3M

UC3M is a young Spanish public university that stands out for its teaching, research, innovation and university life. It ranks 34th worldwide in the QS ranking of the 50 best universities in the world with less than 50 years and is included in the Times Higher Education (THE) 150 Under 50. It is the first university in Spain and third in Europe by the number of students participating in the Erasmus program and has more than 870 agreements with universities in 56 countries, among which are some of the best in the world according to the ranking of the university of Shanghai. 20% of UC3M students are international. The UC3M has numerous accreditations and quality distinctions, such as the EUR-ACE seal in the field of engineering or the AACSB accreditation in business and finance programs, among others.

 

About 5TONIC

5TONIC was initiated by Telefónica and IMDEA Networks Institute with a clear vision to create an open research and innovation ecosystem laboratory in which industry and academia come together to boost technology and business innovative ventures. The laboratory promotes joint project development, joint entrepreneurial ventures, discussion fora, events and conference sites, all in an international environment of the highest impact. 5TONIC serves to show the capabilities and interoperation of pre-commercial 5G equipment, services and applications, by leading global companies in the 5G arena. The laboratory was recently awarded Digital Innovation Hub status by the European Commission.

 

Media contact: 5TONIC@leanfactor.net

 

 

The Software Networks Working Group issued a White Paper in August 2019 on “Cloud-Native and Verticals’ services – 5G-PPP projects analysis“.  The paper analyzes how 5G PPP projects interpret Cloud-Native design patterns and identify adoption barriers.

As part of the 5G PPP Initiative, the Software Network Working Group prepared this white paper as a follow-up of 2018 Cloud-Native transformation white paper to analyze how 5G PPP projects (NGPaaS, 5G-MEDIA, 5G-Transformer, 5G-City, 5G-Picture, 5GTANGO, SAT5G, MATILDA, Slicenet, METROHAUL, NRG5, and Phase 3 project 5GENESIS). interpret Cloud-Native design patterns and identify adoption barriers. The Software Network Working Group conducted a survey to collect technical inputs from 5G PPP Phase 2 and Phase 3 projects on their:
– supported vertical use-cases,
– adopted virtualization technologies,
– followed architecture patterns.

Results are two-fold:

1. Projects are clustered according to their architecture patterns:
   a. Most project prototypes evolved from ETSI MANO relying on an Openstack VIM exclusively to include Kubernetes – on bare metal and public cloud – as a new VIM in parallel to Openstack.
   b. Meanwhile, they kept orchestration intelligence centralized in a VNFM-like box.
   c. Therefore, only a few of them fully exploited Kubernetes as a complete autonomous platform with its own orchestration intelligence able to host both Containerized Network Functions and classical VM-based VNFs.
2. Analysis:
   a. We acknowledge a reluctance for using fully Cloud-Native design provided by e.g. Kubernetes. This reluctance has been analyzed to extract the underlying reasons motivating projects to select this intermediate step where Kubernetes is considered only as a VIM. These reasons are presented as the barriers to adopt the Cloud-Native patterns.
   b. These barriers are essentially the lack of standard and technological maturity, implying human adaptation resistance

 

• Please find the White Paper available to download here.
• Link to October’s Newsletter here.

In the context of the 5G-Transformer project ATOS has been implementing a Proof of Concept (POC) to demonstrate how new network capabilities brought by 5G, provide an entirely new way for consumers to interact with immersive media contents in the         context of a large-scale sport event. High definition streaming services provided by ATOS have been virtualized as a 5G-TRANSFORMER Vertical Slicer (5GT-VS) and orchestrated by the 5G-TRANSFORMER Orchestrator (5GT-SO) so to be deployed at the edge with an abstraction of network and compute configuration parameters. 5G-TRANSFORMER technologies have enabled ATOS, as media application operator, to access to a whole range of multimedia processing and interaction executed in a more distributed way closer to the users while the full infrastructure stack is governed,  monitored and the resources (hardware and software) are automatically scaled.

ATOS at “The Mutuactivos Open de España” (which took place from the 3rd to 6th of October at the Club de Campo Villa de Madrid: https://mutuactivosopen.com/informacion/?lang=en), has been delivering a novel and engaging media solution relied on 5G that merged dissimilar technological concepts such as 5G technologies, cloud-native approach for edge deployments and 4K/360-degree adaptive video streaming to achieve a highly-customizable video streaming experience on an orchestrated 5G network.

White Paper, in which 5G-TRANSFORMER has contributed, is now available to download here:

5GPPP Software Network WG White Paper 2019

Abstract

As part of the 5G-PPP Initiative, the Software Network Working Group prepared this white paper as a follow-up of 2018 Cloud-Native transformation white paper to analyze how 5G-PPP projects1 interpret Cloud-Native design patterns and identify adoption barriers. The Software Network Working Group conducted a survey to collect technical inputs from 5G-PPP Phase 22 and Phase 3 3 projects on their:

    – supported vertical use-cases,

    – adopted virtualization technologies,

    – followed architecture patterns.

Results are two-fold:

    1) Projects are clustered according to their architecture patterns:

a. Most project prototypes evolved from ETSI MANO relying on an Openstack VIM exclusively to include Kubernetes – on bare metal and public cloud – as a new VIM in parallel to Openstack.

b. Meanwhile, they kept orchestration intelligence centralized in a VNFM-like box.

c. Therefore, only a few of them fully exploited Kubernetes as a complete autonomous platform with its own orchestration intelligence able to host both Containerized Network Functions and classical VM-based VNFs.

    2) Analysis:

a. We acknowledge a reluctance for using fully Cloud-Native design provided by e.g. Kubernetes. This reluctance has been analyzed to extract the underlying reasons motivating projects to select this intermediate step where Kubernetes is considered only as a VIM. These reasons are presented as the barriers to adopt the Cloud-Native patterns.

b. These barriers are essentially the lack of standard and technological maturity, implying human adaptation resistance.

For further information, visit the 5GPPP website: https://5g-ppp.eu/white-papers/

 

UC3M, Telefonica and SAMUR performed a demo today about the eHealth use case to Korea Telecom delegates.

The demo focused on the automation of emergency support deployment of medical services, reducing the overall reaction time, as well as providing support to AR services. The demo has been performed at 5TONIC premises.

Juan Carlos Garcia, Director of Planning GCTO at Telefonica  attended the event.

Following, some pictures during the demo:

    

More information:

• Link to SAMUR’s website here.
• Link to UC3M’s website here.
• Link to Telefonica’s website here.
• Link to Korea Telecom’s website here.
• Link to 5TONIC’s website here.

It is now available SAMUR‘s internal magazine-newsletter. It corresponds to the month of July, and the 5G-TRANSFORMER project is present in page 16.

The full article (in Spanish) goes under the name: 

“Ha llegado el momento de innovar: El Proyecto 5G-TRANSFORMER”

 

• Link to download full newsletter (pdf file): BIS Julio 2019

5G-TRANSFORMER was present at the Demo Session of the ACM MobiHoc 2019 conference (2-5 July, Catania) with the Demo called “Composing Services in 5G-TRANSFORMER”, which was carried out with the participation of CTTC, Nextworks and UC3M institutions.

The demo showed the capabilities of the 5GTRANSFORMER architecture to handle the automatic end-to-end orchestration (instantiation/termination) of a composite network service (NS) in a multiPop infrastructure connected using a multi-domain transport network combining different transmission technologies, namely wireless and optical, as depicted in Figure 1.

The value proposition of this demo lies in the enhanced Service Orchestration Engine (SOE) of the 5GT-SO module. The addition of Service Composition capabilities at the SOE module has been transparently added to the initial SOE design looking for simplifying operational workflows and maximizing code reuse. The SOE is able to understand the nature of the NS instantiation request, i.e, whether it is a simple or a composite NS, and act accordingly. In addition to this, in the case of a composite NS request, the SOE is able to accept references to already deployed NSs, check the feasibility of the request, instantiate the missing part of the composite NS and interconnect the different constituent NSs of the requested composite NS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first operational demonstration of dynamic network composition.

   Figure 1. Service Composition Demo – service, platform and underlying infrastructure

Figure 2. Service Composition Demo – Preparation of demo setup

Figure 3. Service Composition Demo – Demo explanation to conference attendants

Video of the demo: