P2CODE envisioned the design and development of an open platform for the deployment and dynamic management of end user applications, over distributed, heterogeneous and trusted IoT-Edge node infrastructures, with enhanced programmability features and tools at both the network infrastructure level and the service design and operational level. The platform was implemented following three innovative design approaches: i) The deployment and management of the applications was conducted by an orchestration framework that followed a vertical layered approach from the end user interface to the infrastructure management while spanning horizontally across the device-edge-core-cloud continuum. The deployment followed the user-defined networking and operational features of the application in its northbound interface and a tight integration with state-of-the-art IoT, edge/cloud computing, and networking platforms in its southbound interface through a well-define driver API framework. With this approach the full programmability and reconfigurability of resources across the continuum was enabled. ii) An open and extensible, programming toolset facilitated application development and deployment for large swarms of devices at the edge through a multi-role Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and new feature development and testing, iii) A secure and trusted framework for registering and authenticating IoT device and edge nodes entering the system as well as the data sharing and application deployment. The concept was tested and validated over a mature testing environment that integrated diverse IoT application areas in smart logistics, manufacturing, utility inspection, and community PPDR over a programable infrastructure extended to O-RAN, 5G, SDN enable core Cloud. The consortium addressed all the required development sectors from the platform technology innovations, to supported IoT infrastructure and applications, including the end user interfacing and resource management intelligence.
As an Innovation Action funded under the EU HORIZON program, COP-PILOT aims to develop a Collaborative Open Platform (COP) piloting framework that enables end-to-end orchestration across service domains. The platform looks to integrate novel AI-driven tools, SLA-preserving automation, and secure infrastructure while piloting diverse real-world applications across sectors like energy, smart cities, agriculture, and manufacturing to drive cross-sector collaboration, innovation, and societal impact. The project will design and implement a cloud-managed service orchestrator (ServOrch) with standardized northbound and southbound interfaces to manage end-to-end services across geo-distributed, multi-tenant domains. Complementing it, a distributed grid of infrastructure orchestrators (InfraOrch) will be created, to expose resources as a service to ServOrch and to interface with advanced compute and network controllers. The platform will integrate state-of-the-art infrastructure controllers for radio access networks, transport and data center SDNs, mobile core networks, and computing clusters, including IoT nodes. Additionally, the platform will incorporate heterogeneous IoT platforms, both legacy and advanced, and will establish a secure integration fabric with standardized interfaces for cross-sector interoperability and dynamic infrastructure registration.
5G-INDUCE relied on the deployment of an open ETSI NFV compatible 5G orchestration platform for the deployment of advanced 5G NetApps. The project focused on the Industry 4.0 vertical sector, as one of the fastest growing and most impactful sectors in European economy with high potentials for service development SMEs and with the capability to tackle all diverse cases of service requirements. The platform was integrated over 3 5G Experimentation Facilities in Spain, Greece, and Italy, and extended with links towards specific Industries, for the showcasing of NetApps in real 5G environment. The platform’s unique features provided the capability to the NetApp developers to define and modify the application requirements while the underlay intelligent OSS could expose the network capabilities to the end users on the application level without revealing any infrastructure related information. This process enabled an application-oriented network management and optimization approach that was in line with the operator’s role as manager of its own facilities, while it offered the operational environment to any developers and service providers through which tailored made applications could be designed and deployed, for the benefit of vertical industries and without any indirect dependency through a cloud provider.
The vision of MATILDA was to design and implement a holistic 5G end-to-end services operational framework tackling the lifecycle of design, development and orchestration of 5G-ready applications and 5G network services over programmable infrastructure, following a unified programmability model and a set of control abstractions.
It aimed to devise and realize a radical shift in the development of software for 5G-ready applications as well as virtual and physical network functions and network services, through the adoption of a unified programmability model, the definition of proper abstractions and the creation of an open development environment that could be used by application as well as network functions developers.
Intelligent and unified orchestration mechanisms were applied for the automated placement of the 5G-ready applications and the creation and maintenance of the required network slices. Deployment and runtime policies enforcement was provided through a set of optimisation mechanisms providing deployment plans based on high level objectives and a set of mechanisms supporting runtime adaptation of the application components and/or network functions based on policies defined on behalf of a services provider.
Multi-site management of the cloud/edge computing and IoT resources was supported by a multi-site virtualized infrastructure manager, while the lifecycle management of the supported Virtual Network Functions Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FGs) as well as a set of network management activities were provided by a multi-site NFV Orchestrator (NFVO). Network and application-oriented analytics and profiling mechanisms were supported based on realtime as well as a posteriori processing of the collected data from a set of monitoring streams. The developed 5G-ready application components, applications, virtual network functions and application-aware network services were made available for open-source or commercial purposes, re-use and extension through a 5G marketplace.
Collecting and analysing large amounts of data in the Cloud-to-Edge computing continuum raises novel challenges. Processing all this data centrally in cloud data centres is not feasible anymore as transferring large amounts of data to the cloud is time-consuming, expensive, degrade performance and may raise security concerns. Therefore, novel distributed computing paradigms, such as edge and fog computing emerged to support processing data closer to its origin. However, such hyper-distributed systems require fundamentally new methods. To overcome the limitation of current centralised application management approaches, Swarmchestrate will develop a completely novel decentralised application-level orchestrator, based on the notion of self-organised interdependent Swarms. Application microservices are managed in a dynamic Orchestration Space by decentralised Orchestration Agents, governed by distributed intelligence that provides matchmaking between application requirements and resources, and supports the dynamic self-organisation of Swarms. Knowledge and trust, essential for the operation of the Orchestration Space, will be managed through blockchain-based trusted solutions using methods of Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) and Distributed Identifiers (DID). End-to-end security of the overall system will be assured by utilising state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms and privacy preserving data analytics. Due to the imminent complexity of the decentralised system, novel simulation approaches will be developed to test and optimise system behaviour (e.g., energy efficiency) in the early stages of development. Additionally, the simulator will be further extended into a digital twin running in parallel to the physical system and improving its behaviour with predictive feedback. The Swarmchestrate concept will be prototyped on four real life demonstrators from the areas of flood prevention, parking space management, urban noise classification and a digital twin of natural habitat.
6G technologies, benefitting from softwarisation, Gb/s speed and sub-THz communications paradigms, open up opportunities for developing new and innovative network management strategies while navigating the evolution toward disaggregation, new software-based paradigms in architecting and operating future connectivity platforms, and embracing features of computing, automation and smartness, trust, privacy and security. Supported by this technology evolution, as the vision of new, smart and innovative capabilities is becoming a reality, superb user experience is expected even in presence of mobility and resource volatility. However, the fundamentally new and unknown features of advanced, disaggregated, virtualized and multi-vendor 6G based infrastructures, challenge the security and resilience design to the next level, by managing the unknown, complex and highly versatile infrastructures as they evolve. Indeed, the future deployment of 6G networks is inextricably connected with an integration of diverse hardware elements and infrastructures, thus leading not only to a highly heterogeneous environment, but also to functions and features that cannot be anticipated at the time of design. The vision of HORSE in this complex scenario, was to deal with the technology solutions, and system evaluation not yet foreseen, towards an omnipresent, smart and secure network service provisioning in the future network-of-networks landscape. To this end, HORSE proposed a novel human-centric, open-source, green, sustainable, coordinated provisioning and protection evolutionary platform, which could inclusively yet seamlessly combine advancements in several domains, as they get added to the system (e.g., predictive threats detection, proactive business-wise threats and breaches mitigation actions, programmable networking, semantic communications, Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), intent-based networking, AI-based techniques, cross-layer management of physical layer features, etc.).