Validation of NFV management and orchestration on Kubernetes-based 5G testbed environment

A network application approach towards 5G and beyond critical communications use cases

“…This way, they differentiate between software designed to address needs exclusive to a particular tenant, or software to meet requirements generated by several vertical industries. Thereby, solutions have been implemented that target different use cases in those industries, most notably the automotive (Bonea et al, 2021;Katsaros et al, 2022), maintenance (Giannakidou et al, 2022;Khadmaoui-Bichouna et al, 2022), and PPDR domains (Apostolakis et al, 2021;Margetis et al, 2022). To experiment with such solutions, several projects propose architectural frameworks (Arampatzis et al, 2021;Martinez-Alpiste et al, 2022) and experimental testbed facilities' augmentations and workflows (Iordache et al, 2022;Margetis et al, 2022) to facilitate Network Applications' deployment, in tandem to the vertical systems under test.…”

“…Thereby, solutions have been implemented that target different use cases in those industries, most notably the automotive (Bonea et al, 2021;Katsaros et al, 2022), maintenance (Giannakidou et al, 2022;Khadmaoui-Bichouna et al, 2022), and PPDR domains (Apostolakis et al, 2021;Margetis et al, 2022). To experiment with such solutions, several projects propose architectural frameworks (Arampatzis et al, 2021;Martinez-Alpiste et al, 2022) and experimental testbed facilities' augmentations and workflows (Iordache et al, 2022;Margetis et al, 2022) to facilitate Network Applications' deployment, in tandem to the vertical systems under test. A common paradigm, followed across 5G PPP initiatives, toward simplifying this implementation and deployment of Network Applications is the adoption of a DevOps (Development and Operations) methodology driven by a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practice (Patachia-Sultanoiu et al, 2021;Trantzas et al, 2021;Koumaras et al, 2022;Trantzas et al, 2022).…”

“…A common paradigm, followed across 5G PPP initiatives, toward simplifying this implementation and deployment of Network Applications is the adoption of a DevOps (Development and Operations) methodology driven by a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practice (Patachia-Sultanoiu et al, 2021;Trantzas et al, 2021;Koumaras et al, 2022;Trantzas et al, 2022). These favour a workflow for microservices architectural-style design and containerized deployment of network services and applications (Grigoriou et al, 2022;Margetis et al, 2022).…”

“…While appropriate standards for the support of PPDR services were described in Release 15 of the 3GPP specifications, including Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT) (third Generation Partnership Project, 2017a), Mission Critical Video (MCVideo) (third Generation Partnership Project, 2017b) and Mission Critical Data (MCData) (third Generation Partnership Project, 2018), EU public safety organisations continue to rely on legacy PPDR networks, such as TETRA, TETRAPOL, P25, and DMR (Neto et al, 2022). To incentivise a transition of PPDR services to commercial broadband networks, the benefits of 5G technology for this vertical are well-documented in the scientific literature (Franchi et al, 2022;Borsatti et al, 2023), as have several frameworks, tools, innovative systems and research projects, to address service requirements in the sector (Apostolakis et al, 2021;Arampatzis et al, 2021;Chochliouros et al, 2021;Margetis et al, 2022;Sterle et al, 2022). Therefore, research focus has now shifted towards delivering reliable and unquestionable experimental evidence regarding the practical offerings of 5G to critical communications use cases (Volk and Sterle, 2021;Borsatti et al, 2023).…”

“…5gepicentre.eu) envisioned a dedicated and federated 5G PPDR experimentation facility, bringing together four heterogeneous 5G testbeds with the aim of aggregating their computational resources and making them available through a single point of access (Tabatabaei et al, 2023), for what has been a traditionally challenging vertical to develop for. The project embraced an Experimentation-as-a-Service (EaaS) approach (Kalogiros et al, 2019;Midoglu et al, 2021) from the very beginning, realizing a conceptual cloud-native framework for how such an online aggregator for 5G PPDR experiment ordering would be architected (Arampatzis et al, 2021); accumulating evidence on Kubernetes-based management and orchestration to support experiment deployment (Margetis et al, 2022); and demonstration of thorough management of 5G Quality of Service (QoS) Identifiers (5QIs) for PPDR applications by leveraging the project's Network Application development paradigm (Cordeiro et al, 2023).…”