5GASP- Experimentation and Certification Platform
Journal: IEEE Communications Magazine
Manuscript ID COMMAG-22-00182
Manuscript Type: (S1) Network Softwarization and Management Series
Date Submitted by the
06-Jun-2022
Author:
Complete List of Authors: Gomes, Diogo; Universidade de Aveiro, Instituto de Telecomunicações
Direito, Rafael ; at Instituto de Telecomunicações de Aveiro,
Telecommunications and Networking – Av
Marzouk, Fatma; Universidade de Aveiro, Departamento de Electrónica,
Telecomunicações e Informática; Instituto de Telecomunicacoes,
Vasilaskos, Xenofon; University of Bristol, Dept. of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering
Uniyal, Navdeep; University of Bristol, High Performance Networks
Research Group
Simeonidou, Dimitra; university of Bristol, Bristol Digital Futures
Institute
Tranoris, Christos; University of Patras Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Trantzas , Kostis ; University of Patras Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Oproiu, Elena; Orange Romania, Development and
Innovation/Engineering
Hermosilla , Ana ; Odin Solutions, Research & Innovation
Gallego-Madrid, Jorge; Odin Solutions, Innovation
Susnik, Rudolf; Internet Institute, Research And Development
Koršič , Luka; Internet Institute, Research & Development
Shaw, Ben; at European Advanced Networking Test Center, 5G Core &
5G NR
Odarchenko, Roman; Bundleslab Felelossegu Tarsasag, Research And
Development
Arnaudov , Vesselin ; VMWARE, Advanced Development
Keywords:
5G, 5GASP, NetApp, Experimentation, Validation, Certification, CI/CD,
NetAppStore
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5GASP- Experimentation and Certification Platform
Diogo Gomes 1,2 , Rafael Direito 1 , Fatma Marzouk1,2 , Xenofon Vasilakos 3, Navdeep Uniyal3 , Dimitra Simeonidou 3 , Christos
Tranoris 4 , Kostis Trantzas4, Oproiu Elena-Madalina5, Ana Hermosilla6 , Jorge Gallego-Madrid 6, Rudolf Sušnik7 , Luka Koršič7 ,
Ben Shaw8 , Roman Odarchenko9and Vesselin Arnaudov10
1 Instituto de T elecomunicações, Portugal, 2 Universidade
5 Orange Romania, 6 Odin Solutions,
de Aveiro, Protugal, 3 University of Bristol, UK, 4 University of Patras, Greece,
Spain,
Center, Deutschland,
9 Bundleslab Felelossegu T arsasag, Hungary, 10 VMware Bulgaria.
7 Internet Institute Ltd., Slovenia, 8 European Advanced Networking T est
Abstract—The recent advancements in 5G networks and
standards have largely propelled the development of a wide range
of vertical -industry 5G-based solutions. This poses a constant
pressure on Network operators to keep up with use cases and
corresponding rapidly developed solutions. Thus, there is a
widespread demand for diminishing the time -to-market of
Network Applications (NetApps). 5GASP is a Horizon 2020
project focused on addressing this issue by providing semi-public
testbeds where organizations can deploy and va lidate their
NetApps, consequently accelerating the development of their
solutions. This work discusses 5GASP’s motivation, a blueprint of
its ecosystem architecture, and how it addresses the development,
validation, and certification of vertical -specific Network
Applications, with references to some of the project’s Network
Applications empowered by the 5GASP ecosystem.
Index Terms—5G, 5GASP, NetApp, Experimentation,
Validation, Certification, CI/CD, NetAppStore.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Mobile communication technologies have been evolving
unprecedentedly fast. According to [1], over the past ten years
only, data traffic in cellular networks has grown 300x. There
are currently 8.1B connections on cellular networks worldwide,
a number that will reach 8.9B by 2027, with the vast majority
(92%) being mobile broadband. Evidently, 5G is expanding
faster than previous generations of mobile communications and
powering many vertical industries. As the innovative solutions
by integrators and verticals service providers reach closer to
maturity, testing and validation become increasingly important.
Particularly, the differentiated needs of automotive industry and
Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) verticals call for
different support levels for converting concepts to prototypes,
and from prototypes to products. On the other hand, there is
wide consensus that such heterogeneous vertical services
require to exchange data, especially when involving mobility
scenarios such as the use-cases mentioned above. In this
context, the authors of this article are involved in the 5GASP
H2020-ICT initiative [2], a European project that is driven by
the above expectations and challenges. Specifically 5GASP
creates a fully automated and self-service European testbed to
accelerate the development and testing of innovative 5G
Network Applications (NetApps) by SMEs following the 5G
NFV paradigm architecture. Leveraging existing physical
hardware and software infrastructures across Europe, 5GASP
focuses on real-field experimentation and testing operations
across several different interconnected domains, by providing
software tools backing Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
in a secure & trustworthy environment for SMEs. Moreover,
5GASP envisages the establishment of an Open-Source
Software (OSS) repository and a VNF marketplace for SMEs
that will include OSS sample code and building blocks, hence
incubating a NetApp developer community supported by tools
and services for early validation/certification of developed 5G
NetApps. A particular focus is also put on inter-domain usecases, and the development of appropriate tools and procedures
for testing and validation activities. In the following sections,
we discuss 5GASP’s initial technological outcome, its vision,
and main use cases. Specifically, Section II briefly explains the
concept of NETAPPs for 5G and Beyond Systems. Section III
and IV outline 5GASP’s vision and currently developed pilot
NetApp services, respectively. Section V details 5GASP’s
global architecture. Section VI explains the NetApp
certification process, while section VII provides a brief
overview of 5GASP’s NetAppStore. Finally, section VIII
concludes the paper.
II. CONCEPT OF NETAPPS FOR 5G AND BEYOND
SYSTEMS
In absence of a standard NetApp definition, various 5G-PPP
Phase 3 ICT-41 projects have adopted the term to describe
specific VNF-based solutions tailored to verticals, eventually
reflected in [3]. Specifically, in 5GASP a NetApp, in the
context of the 5G System, is defined as a set of services that
provide certain functionalities to verticals and their associated
use cases. Thereby, we identify a series of key characteristics
within the context of our proposed definition [4]. First, we
assume the ETSI NFV model for the delivery and deployment
process. Additionally, we adopt mandatory compliance with the
Service Based Architecture paradigm, and that both hardware
and software parts may be considered part of a NetApp.
Software parts should be deployed either in a virtualized or
containerized manner. In addition, a NetApp may be a part of
one or more vertical application services, and in the eventof the
delivery of these services to 5G Verticals, it can reside in one
or more 5G slices. The 5G slices can either be shareable or not.
Furthermore, assuming the need for interaction with a 5G and
beyond system a NetApp should be able to consume the
respective APIs, if allowed. Thus, it must support relevant
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3GPP standards. Such interactions may include location
services, Quality of Service (QoS) management, Resource
Reservation, etc. Likewise, it may cons ume monitoring and
telemetry data from the 5G System, provided by analytics
functions like the Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF).
Lastly, the NetApp may interact with the virtualized
infrastructure, namely with both the NFV Orchestrator and the
Virtualized
Infrastructure Manager (VIM)/Container
Infrastructure Service Management (CISM), if this is not
restricted.
5GASP CONCEPT AND VISION
In 5GASP, the focus is on innovation for operations and
secure/trusted service provisioning that take advantage of
experimental facilities featuring virtualised or containerized
functions. In more details, 5GASP concept is of a multi-domain
testbed in which NetApps can be deployed in minutes across
several facilities, following a testing and validation towards
future certification. The testbeds address the need of a new
community composed of innovative SMEs, industry software
creators, mobile network operators (MNOs), content and
service providers that can benefit from 5G technologies.
5GASP aspires to support them both with technology and
knowledge provided by project partners and will be open to
participation by experts and newcomers alike.
DevOps (Development and Operations) represent a set of
practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT
operations (Ops). 5GASP follows a DevOps methodology in
which development and operation teams collaborate throughout
the NetApp development lifecycle order to build, test, deploy
and monitor applications with speed, quality and control as
illustrated in figure 1.
DevOps aims to shorten the life cycle of creating a new
system/software and enables continuous integration and
delivery. 5GASP proposes the adoption of this methodology,
adapted to 5G NetApps development, targeting the project’s
member SME’s developing NetApps as the primary
beneficiaries of this approach. To implement this methodology
in 5GASP, automated orchestration and deployment are
needed. There is also the need to provide automatic testing
mechanisms that can ensure the quality of the NetApps being
developed.
III.
and their integration is not well covered by existing traditional
IT testing methodologies and tools. To solve this shortcoming,
5GASP offers new DevOps and testing capabilities to third
parties in order that the latter test their novel NetApps in a cost
and time effective manner [2].
New solutions, such as DevOps over multi-site experimental
substrates and Testing-as-a-Service will be offered by 5GASP
in order to enable NetApps’ deployment and industrial-grade
testing, enabling NetApp developers to deploy their NetApps
and run their tests regardless of their geographical location,
gather the results and analyze them in order to refine their
NetApps [2].
One of 5GASP's goals is to enable a tool to instantiate E2E
services across multiple domains without prior negotiations,
which can be made available through an E2E Network Slice
composed of NSs or Network Slices. Thus, we aim to connect
the independently E2E Network Slice Subnets by orchestrating
an overlay between them, providing a secure channel where the
communication between domains can successfully occur
dynamically. The technology chosen to implement this overlay
is Wireguard, a state-of-the-art framework allowing rapid
instantiation and configuration. To enable a zero-touch
orchestration, a third-party entity is deployed. This entity is
named NetOr (cross-domain Network Orchestrator) and is
responsible for receiving and processing the dynamic overlay
information and exchanging it with the other domain peers, thus
enabling the connectivity between independent domains. The
multi-domain connectivity enabling process starts with the
instantiation of a Vertical Service, defined via blueprints and
descriptors. During this phase, NetOr creates all the required
entities and instantiates the network resources needed in each
of the domains. When all entities are instantiated and the
required resources become available, NetOr triggers a runtime
operation that gets all tunnels' information and makes it
available to all the peers. Then in turn, the peers update their
configuration, enabling the connectivity between the different
domains.
Another relevant aspect is to offer automatic tests to check the
correctness and availability of the NetApps. These tests not
only cover inspections when they are deployed, but also
descriptors’ proofreading verifications deploying them in a
testing environment prior to production deployment, and even
custom tests to check particular features, specific to each
NetApp. This way, Verticals can ensure the correctness and
proper behaviour of their NetApps. 5GASP targets SMEs that
cannot afford a full-blown testbed, let alone a distributed testing
environment. Through 5GASP, such SMEs can access 5G
testbeds and vertical environments such as for the Automotive
and PPDR cases. 5GASP partners provide experimental
facilities across Europe with various degrees of sophistication
from pure cloud-based to pre-commercial 5G deployments and
Network Providers validating NetApps’ support.
5GASP NETAPPS SERVICES AND
REQUIREMENTS
In what follows, we discuss two NetApps designed and
developed by 5GASP consortium members for the Automotive
and Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) vertical use
cases, respectively. These, as well as the rest of the consortium
IV.
Fig.1. 5GASP - a DevOps for 5G Networks
Software Networks technologies, such as NFV and SDN, which
are expected to dominate 5G networks, are key offers in 5GASP
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developed NetApps also outlined next, are pilots posing a
paradigm for third-party NetApp developers who wish to use
the 5GASP platform for development and testing purposes.
–
Automotive vertical - vOBU NetApp.
5G improves the development and configuration of novel
vehicular services, aiming to reach a fully automated operation
in near future, through the enablement to easily implement
MEC capabilities aiming to offload tasks performed by mobile
devices. These capabilities also ensure low-latency responses
due to the proximity of the computing facilities to the point of
attachment, which results in a very interesting field of research
regarding Automotive Verticals. To illustrate it, we expose the
vOBU NetApp, which is based on the idea of offloading the
most time and compute-consuming tasks from the On-Board
Unit (OBU) of the vehicle to a virtual OBU (vOBU) deployed
on the MEC. In order to integrate all the required virtual
resources for each OBU, the novel idea of instantiating virtual
substitutes for these vOBUs has been proved to be beneficial in
terms of device access delay, reliability against wireless
disconnections or data cache, as the Hybrid Communications to
Foster 5G Vehicular Services [5] proposal demonstrated in the
context of the 5GinFIRE project 2 .
–
PPDR vertical - 5G IOPS NetApp. For a long time, PPDR
sector has been relying on narrowband communication
networks, while commercial sector has been already utilizing
several generations’ younger technology [6]. With the advent
of LTE-Advanced and 5G, PPDR mission-critical requirements
can be finally achieved with mobile broadband technology [7].
Eventually, 5G will support multiple services such as missioncritical voice and data, real-time video streaming for sensing
affected areas, situational awareness, searching and rescuing
using robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), massive
Internet of Things (IoT), as well as many other broadband
services. Challenges that NetApps designed for the PPDR
domain address, may be related to specific needs of the enduser and/or to the infrastructure requirements. Isolated
Operation for Public Safety (IOPS) concept is an example of an
infrastructure related feature which has been first introduced in
3GPPP Rel. 13 [8] and will be realized within 5GASP as a “5G
IOPS NetApp”. The objective of the NetApp is to provide
communication resources for the public safety users under any
circumstances, i.e., even in case the backhaul connectivity to
the core network, and thus also to the Internet, is disturbed or it
fails completely. Under disastrous circumstances, local
mission-critical services are activated to maintain the
communication path between end-users, although it comes with
limited functionality since local mission-critical services are
hosted on the MEC infrastructure.
Besides the above NetApps, other 5GASP consortium pilot
NetApps include the following ones, with details available in
our 5GASP online developer community portal repository of
experiments [9]:
–
Virtual RoadSide Unit provisioning: the edge
instantiation-based NetApp intends to offload the
computational process from the physical stations and
ensure low latencies response.
–
–
–
–
–
–
ITS station: allows users to develop new applications and
services for the Automotive and PPDR verticals ensuring
compatibility with C-ITS standards (Cooperative
Intelligent Transport Systems).
Multi-domain Migration: allows the vOBUs to be
migrated to the MEC, closest to the real vehicle, reaching
the low latencies requisites.
Vehicle-to-Cloud (V2C) Real-Time Communication:
ensures optimized data transmission based on the content
being sent, thus enabling the vehicle to send and receive
data in real-time.
Remote Human Driving: offers a superior connectivity
platform for low latency HD video suitable for any remote
operation scenario, supervision, remote driving or highlevel commands.
Efficient MEC handover: a Machine Learning based
application, which consumes the radio monitoring data and
predicts the probability of UE being handed over from one
access point to another in a radio access environment in the
next n seconds.
PrivacyAnalyzer: acts as a software tool for the
identification of faulty or malicious behaviour either due to
software bugs or due to privacy leaks.
Vehicle Route Optimizer: a dynamic pooled
transportation service (Demand Responsive Transport)
solution as flexible as traditional ride-sharing.
Fire detection and ground assistance using drones: a cloud
native application onboarded to an air drone enabling
teams on the ground observing live images and detect fires.
V. 5GASP GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE
The main objective of 5GASP is to capture verticals’
requirements along with the experimenters’ NetApps, network,
and cloud functions and provide a seamless onboarding,
deployment, and testing process through an interconnected
reference ecosystem of experimental facilities. Thereby, a
detailed architecture, defining the internal and external
components and their interfaces, the exposed APIs to the
developers/experimenters, and the user management interface
and requirements, is introduced in Figure 2. Top-down, a single
entry-point to the 5GASP system is provided in the form of a
user-friendly portal solution that supports the uploading of
NetApp’s NFV artefacts, the onboarding of the latter to relevant
experimental facilities, and the selection of predefined test
suites or the design of custom ones to be executed against the
onboarded NetApp. The entity that encapsulates the
aforementioned management interface is referred to as 5GASP
NetApp Onboarding and Deployment Services (NODS).
NODS, aside from an entry-point to the 5GASP system,
provides a Service Order Management (SOM) service and
offers its own Service and Network Orchestrator that
coordinates actions with the underlying facilities or other
NFV/3GPP compliant systems. Following the capture of the
NetApp’s deployment order, NODS is charged with the
fulfilment of the latter employing its internal services, and
eventually with the supervision of its deployment over the
multi-domain NFV fabric, comprising of the 5GASP facilities.
Should this procedure be successfully conducted, NODS then
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Fig.2. 5GASP Architecture and DevOps lifecycle
triggers the testing pipeline, and the flow is committed to the
respective entity, namely the CI/CD sservice. Eventually, after
a successful CI/CD pipeline execution, the flow is reverted to
NODS, which i) grants access to the CI/CD results, along with
the potentially applicable certification (further elaborated in
Section VIII) and ii) in the case of a certification acquisition the
NetApp is published in the NetAppStore, therefore making it
publicly available.
The onboarding procedure is the process whereby the NetApp
(specifically, its descriptors) are uploaded to the platform in
order to be available to be instantiated. As 5GASP project aims
i) to support the NetApp developer to onboard their NetApp
effortlessly and transparently, and ii) to provide an abstraction
solution so that onboarding, activation and testing of a NetApp
can be appropriately performed on any NFV compliant 5G
System, besides the 5GASP facilities. Therefore, the need of a
unified onboarding and deployment model has emerged. To that
extent, the proposal of a unified standards-based model is
attempted, that bears the form of a “triplet” of entities triggering
a deployment order, as depicted in Figure 3.
This “triplet” consists of the following entities [10]:

The NetApp artefact, that describes the NetApp to be
deployed within the corresponding 5G network slice.

The Network Slice that meets the specific
requirements of the NetApp and is instantiated in a
target facility.

The Test Suite, described in terms of a test descriptor
model, which should be executed after the activation
of the NetApp.
The main aim of the proposed approach is to define each part
of the unified model towards the same resource model that
provides a comprehensive description of a given service,
including information on its topology and expected behavior.
That being the case, 5GASP’s approach for each entity is to be
defined under the TMF’s Service Specification model [11],
being a wide industry utilized class that outlines any type of
service through a standardized set of characteristics.
Fig. 3. 5GASP onboarding and deployment model
The CI/CD Service in 5GASP aims to reduce the time needed
for service creation and its cost, by providing an open,
automated, and visualized certification platform.
Given several specifications of each testbed across the 5GASP
ecosystem, the CI/CD Service was conceived to operate in a
distributed paradigm. The main components of this service are
the CI/CD Manager, CI/CD Agents, Local Test Repositories
(LTR), and the Test Visualization Dashboard (TRVD). Besides
this, the 5GASP NODS also has a significant importance in the
CI/CD Service, since it is responsible for triggering a validation
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process. After 5GASP NODS triggers a validation process on
the CI/CD Manager, the Manager will create a testing pipeline
configuration file, based on the Testing Descriptor onboarded
on NODS, and submit it to the CI/CD Agents responsible for
testing the NetApp. Then, the CI/CD Agent will gather all the
required test files from the LTR deployed on the testbed. These
tests will have to be further augmented using the testing
variables initially provided by the NODS. Once this process is
finished, the Agent will perform the tests, collect their results,
and send them to the CI/CD Manager, which will make them
available via the TRVD. Once a validation process ends, the
CI/CD Manager will inform the NODS of this event and
provide information on how the developers will be able to
check test outputs, via the TRVD. The CI/CD Service could
provide flexible automation testing employing two types of
testing, i.e. Developer-defined Tests and 5GASP-Predefined
Tests. Each test case would be either materialized by a test
descriptor, which could be defined by the developer and
executed, or a test campaign, optionally defined by the tester
and executed via open-source tools. Regarding test descriptors,
they are composed of two different types: tests included as
scripts (code that will be executed) and Test VNFs. A test
VNF’s purpose is to perform specific tests via open-source
tools, which run in it, but it is not involved in the functionality
of the NetApp itself. In that sense, the difference between them
is that the Test VNF is a separate VNF that executes the tests
(as they are included inside the VNF), whereas the scripts can
be executed inside the NetApp VNFs or in a different place. The
test VNF is one logic element, which shares the physical
resource with CI/CD Agent. The tests on the Test VNF are
managed by one centralized logic element Automation Server
that shares the physical resource with CI/CD Manager.
Currently, the tests are implemented using the Robot
Framework, which already provides detailed and interactive
result files. The platform also includes a test repository, with
pre-defined tests and simple tests to be reused, along with the
ability of creating custom tests using the test descriptor.
The most crucial component of the CI/CD Service is the CI/CD
Manager. This entity is accessible via a REST interface and has
the following roles: (i) registering of the CI/CD Agents, (ii)
providing information about the tests available in each testbed,
(iii) creating the pipeline configuration files that will be
submitted to the CI/CD Agents, which will guide the testing and
validating phase, and (iv) continuously updating the status of a
test and validation process.The CI/CD Manager receives the
Testing Descriptors from the 5GASP NODS and based on
these, it creates a testing pipeline configuration file. Then, it
will submit the file to the CI/CD Agent that will perform the
validation process. The configuration file contains information
about (i) how to set up the testing environment, (ii) how to
obtain the tests from the LTR, (iii) how to perform these tests,
(iv) how to update the status of a testing process continuously,
and (v) how to submit the test results to the TRVD.
After all tests are executed, the CI/CD Agents collect the test
results. These results are generated by Robot Framework, and
each test will have three different outputs: (i) log.html, (ii)
report.html, and (iii) output.xml. These files will then be
submitted to the CI/CD Manager's Results Repository. Oncethe
test results are stored in the Results Repository, it is necessary
to make them available to the NetApps' developers. To do so,
the CI/CD Service provides a TRVD. This component
consumes the outputs and result files via the CI/CD Manager's
API and provides a visual and interactive presentation of these.
Via the TRVD, it is possible to observe all the stages of the
validation process, as well as their output.
VI. 5GASP CERTIFICATION
The new 5G NetApp ecosystem will spin innovation from a
multitude of new European companies, most of them SMEs that
are innovative in software design and development but lack the
means to thoroughly test, validate and certify their products
across diverse 5G environments. Furthermore, network
operators will be challenged to independently assess and
validate the various NetApps individually. 5GASP aims to
unlock such a dilemma by creating an automated 5GASP
certification (5GASP-C) open for third-party NetApp
functionality, performance, security, and connectivity
certification on one or multiple of 5GASP testbeds. 5GASP-C
enables the reproducible and effective tests to reduce the
individual validation effort by NetApp developers and
operators. The following parties are typically involved in the
5GASP-C process.
 NetApp Applicant - an equipment manufacturer
providing a NetApp supporting the 5GASP
requirements, which would like to certificate his
NetApp in 5GASP-C platform.
 Authorized Testbed - an independent Testbed with
5GASP approval to provide test reports for NetApp
certification.
 Certification Authority - the 5GASP Logo owner and
Program Administration of 5GASP Certification.
VII. THE 5GASP NET A PP STORE
NetAppStore is a showcase portal of registered network
applications that is key to disseminating the project results.
NetAppStore supports business around NetApps, Network
Functions and Network Services, while also providing a public
registry of SMEs and their reusable products: NetApps,
Network Functions and Network Services. Moreover, any
useful information and documentation for SMEs will be
available at this portal as well.
Fig. 4. 5GASP NetAppStore and NetAppCommunity
The interface utilized for publishing a NetApp to the
NetAppStore and therefore making it publicly available (after
the successful completion of the DevOps experimentation and
certification readiness lifecycle), is based on TMF’s Product
resource model [12]. As a result of employing such a widely
observed model in the telecommunications industry, effortless
interaction with other production systems can be achieved.
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Furthermore, consistency between the deployment and ordering
model is maintained, as TMF’s resource models are extensively
used thought the deployment process as well. Lastly, adopting
a business aspect-oriented model imposes the essential
abstraction layer between the customer and the service
provider.
Last, besides the NetAppStore there is the NetAppCommunity
portal supporting NetApp developers and users as illustrated in
figure 4. The 5GASP’s Community Portal is already online [
https://community.5gasp.eu/], and it aims to bring the 5G
community closer to the 5GASP project by providing state-ofthe-art tools for test deployment, test automation, continuous
integration, and monitoring of testbeds. The Portal comprises a
knowledge center including several video tutorials and
workshops, NetApp case studies, etc.
VIII. CONCLUDING REMARKS
5GASP involves six experimentation facilities throughout
Europe: Aveiro, Bristol, Patras, Murcia, Ljubljana, and
Bucharest. These infrastructures have already been validated
within several H2020 5G previous projects. The combination of
those experimentation facilities within this project’s scope shall
lead to an integrated, open, cooperative and fully networked
platform.
As the project approaches the end of its first year, several
milestones have been achieved, and results have been made
public in the project website and source code repository.
5GASP objective is to make it reproducible, and all tools that
run the testbeds, CI/CD platform and Tests have been made
public. In the next years we plan in extending these tools and
tests with more features and completeness.
A CKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has received funding from the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant
agreement No 101016448 (5GASP project), from Fundación
Séneca Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de
Murcia under the FPI Grant 21429/FPI/20, and co-funded by
Odin Solutions S.L., Región de Murcia (Spain); and by the
Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the
Industrial PhD grant DIN2019-010827.
[8] 3GPP TS 22.346, “ Technical Specification Group Services and System
Aspects; Isolated Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (EUTRAN) operation for public safety; Stage 1 (Release 13),” Sept. 2014.
[9] '5GASP Public Repository of Experiments', 2022. [Online]. Available:
https://community.5gasp.eu/index.php/public-repository-of-experiments/.
[Accessed: 5- May- 2022]
[10] K. Trantzas et al., "An automated CI/CD process for testing and
deployment of Network Applications over 5G infrastructure," in 2021
IEEE International Mediterranean Conference on Communications and
Networking (MeditCom), IEEE, 2021, pp. 156-16
[11]TM Forum, "TMF633 - Service Catalog Management API REST
Specification", 2020
[12] TM Forum, “ TMF620 - Product Catalog Management API REST
Specification”, 2021.
Diogo Gomes (dgomes@av.it.pt) is a Professor at the
University of Aveiro and a researcher at Instituto de
Telecomunicações. His research interests include 5G/6G
service platforms and AI applied to IIoT scenarios. He's the
coordinator of project H2020-5GASP.
Rafael Direito (rdireito@av.it.pt) is a Researcher at Instituto de
Telecomunicações de Aveiro. His research interests include
NFV, DevSecOps, Testbeds Monitoring, and New Generation
Networks Service Orchestration.
Fatma Marzouk (fatma.marzouk@av.it.pt) is an IT engineer
currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications with
the University of Aveiro, Portugal. Her research interests
include Mobile Networks, Vehicular Adhoc Networks,
Resource Management, and Software Defined Networks.
Xenofon Vasilakos [M] (xenofon.vasilakos@bristol.ac.uk) is a
Lecturer with the University of Bristol, and his research is
aligned with Bristol Digital Futures Institute and Smart Internet
Lab. His research interests include 5G/6G; Edge Computing;
and Machine Learning approaches toward Zero-touch network
and service management. He has participated in 12 research
projects and received Greek or French government awards or
fellowships.
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Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) and a Fellow of the
IEEE (FIEEE).
Christos Tranoris [M] (tranoris@ece.upatras.gr) is a Senior
Researcher in the Electrical & Computer Engineering
Department, University of Patras, Greece. He leads the
architecture, operations and evolution of Patras5G facility. He
is architect of Openslice and technical manager in various
H2020 projects in the areas of 5G/6G, Experimental Testbeds,
NFV/SDN.
Kostis Trantzas [M] (ktrantzas@ece.upatras.gr) is a
Researcher in the Electrical & Computer Engineering
Department, University of Patras, Greece. His research interests
focus on SDN/NFV, cloud computing, network slicing and
monitoring, aiming at the delivery of fully orchestrated and
trusted end-to-end services on new generation mobile networks.
Oproiu Elena-Madalina (elena.oproiu@orange.com) is a PhD
Transmission Expert at Orange Romania.
Ana Hermosilla (ahermosilla@odins.es) is a researcher in
Odin Solutions and a PhD candidate in the Department of
Information and Communication Engineering, University of
Murcia, Spain. Her research interests include NFV/SDN, 5G,
MEC, and virtualization/cloud platforms.
Jorge Gallego-Madrid (jgallego@odins.es) is a full-time
predoctoral researcher at the University of Murcia and Odin
Solutions. His research interests include Internet of Things,
intelligent transportation systems, 5G, ZSM and network
slicing techniques.
Rudolf Sušnik (rudolf.susnik@iinstitute.eu) manages research
and innovation-oriented projects at Internet Institute. He has
over 15 years of experiences from academia and ICT industry,
working for network operators and for global technology
providers.
Luka Koršič (luka.korsic@iinstitute.eci) is a co-founder and
CTO at Internet Institute. His work area is focused to distributed
cloud services and networks, orchestration and quality of
service testing in modern mobile, virtualized and
programmable network systems.
Ben Shaw (benshaw@eantc.de) is a Researcher at European
Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC). His research
interests include Mobile Network, NFV/SDN, automation
testing, MANO, and Open RAN.
Roman Odarchenko (roman@bundleslab.com) is a senior
researcher in Bundleslab KFT, Budapest, Hungary. He is the
author of three books, more than 90 articles, and more than 10
inventions. His research interests include telecommunication
systems and networks, mobile networks, wireless systems,
software-defined networking, network security systems etc.
Vesselin Arnaudov (varnaudov@vmware.com) is the director
of the Advanced Development Center in Bulgaria, Vesselin
Arnaudov is currently responsible for leading the incubation
and research activities for VMware’s largest R&D site in
EMEA, as well as driving the collaboration with the regional
academic and start-up communities.