5G platform-as-a-service project
Nokia Bell Labs is to lead a consortium of industry vendors, operators, IT companies, small and medium-sized enterprises and European academic institutions to build (over the next 24 months) the Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service (NGPaaS) for the 5G era.
The consortium is part of the 5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership (5G-PPP), launched in 2014 as an initiative between the European Union and telecom concerns.
5G standard is emerging at a particular time in technology history when the cloud is deeply transforming many industries and services. As such, innovations have to be cloud-native in order to be successful and this means adopting a model beyond the current telco infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model: a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.
Such a 5G cloud-native platform has two key features:
- An ideal 5G cloud-native platform must facilitate building, shipping and running virtual network function (VNF) applications with 'telco-grade' quality in terms of latency, reliability and capacity, thereby delivering the promise of 5G performance.
- It must also combine all sorts of third-party applications with those VNF, thereby creating more versatile and powerful cloud objects breaking silos between connectivity (to humans, robots, sensors, etc) and computing (machine learning, big data, video applications).
Such a platform does not exist today. With NGPaaS, the consortium's goal is to realise the vision of adopting the PaaS model to optimally support cloud-native 5G systems.
"The consortium's ambition for developing a next-generation PaaS is to enable developers to collaborate within the 5G ecosystem (operator, vendor, third party) in order to ignite new businesses, thereby increasing market scale and improving market economics,” said Bessem Sayadi, consortium project leader and research manager for Nokia Bell Labs.
The partners in the consortium are:
- Vendors and IT: Nokia Bell Labs France (FR), Nokia (IL), ATOS (ES)
- Operators: BT (UK), Orange (FR)
- Small and medium-sized enterprises: Virtual Open Systems (FR), Vertical M2M (FR), B-COM (FR), ONAPP (UK)
- Academia: University of Milano-Bicocca (IT), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU), IMEC (BE)
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