As 5G standards have largely matured, further enabling the radical development of 5G networks, the pressure for mobile operators to keep up with widening range of industry and contemporary use cases increases. Consequently, many approaches are emerged from the perspective of the vertical's interaction with the 5G system especially while onboarding specific vertical Network Applications (or NetApps). This work discusses an approach which reduces the complexity of this interaction by introducing a novel yet standard based vertical onboarding model. Our approach focuses on preserving interoperability and reproducibility with other systems through the exclusive utilization of data models derived by embracing well-known industry standards. Being also pragmatic, the mechanisms presented in this paper are implemented and applied in a large distributed 5G infrastructure.
The 5G system promises to deliver an environment for applications and markets that can easily capitalize on the new services and advanced interfaces that the 5G developments introduce. Recently, in the context of European research and innovation actions, the term NetApp was introduced. A NetApp, in the context of the 5G System, is defined as a set of services that provide certain functionalities to the verticals and their associated use cases. While there is no specific standard for describing the NetApp concept, the ETSI NFV model is adopted to describe the delivery and deployment of NetApps. This work presents an approach for automating the deployment and testing of NetApps in the context of the 5G system. The envisaged process focuses on innovations related to the operation of experiments and tests across several domains, providing software support tools for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) of NetApps and their artifacts in a secure and trusted environment.
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