As Chair of IEEE SDN, I’m very honored and pleased posting today the report (made by Cagatay Buyukkoc AT&T) of the Mobile Edge
Cloud kick-off workshop (IEEE NJ, on November 16, 2015) organized by the IEEE SDN
Initiative, Preindustrial Committee.
There is some fragmentation in the implementation of SDN/NFV frameworks.
The main objective of Preindustrial Committee (Chaired by Cagatay Buyukkoc AT&T) is to create environments towards
industrial and academic convergence in areas that we collectively decide that
are key in our drive towards “5G Era.” To be able to do this, our committee is
looking at opportunities for Proof of Concept (POC) work and establish
relationships with other groups doing relevant work in Europe, Asia, Americas,
Africa, etc. to
increase collaboration & reduce duplication. The idea is to promote experimentation and build consensus
around a small set of implementation frameworks. Otherwise, there is a danger
of SDN/NFV islands that are not interoperable.
A main focus of the workshop was to introduce a small set of frameworks
for such a POC at the Mobile Edge that goes beyond the usual rhetoric and
actually implement it in an Open lab environment try to support the idea that
look very promising. In this case we chose to start with ON.lab to support a
POC on M-CORD as the platform. The details of the POC is at the end of this
brief report. Within the
industry and academia and continue supporting POCs and trials. Hence, the main
focus is on potential gaps in the industry, and addressing the practical side
of innovations, creating
flexibility as well as
interoperability.
Here are the SDN Initiative short and longer term objectives for this
Preindustrial work:
- Identify use-cases and proof-of-concepts (POCs) for SDN-NFV frameworks for End to End (E2E) services scenarios (e.g., CRAN, Orchestration of VNF, fixed + mobile OS, SDX etc.) E2E architectural components. E2E coordination/collaboration on policy, QoS, QoE and including device capabilities are longer term objectives.
- Rethinking everything: Software, Automation, Shannon, Control, Cellular structure, Next Generation (NG) Base Stations and Mobile Edge, Spectrum, Software Defined-Air interface, NG Core, NG RAN, NG Edge, Complexity, Resilience, etc.
- Define the experimental best practices for validating various use-case and proof-of-concepts (in coordination with other ongoing initiatives, e.g., ETSI/MEC, ITU-T, ATIS, ONF, OpNFV, etc.) Prepare – as a group – to identify major gaps, create a research community around them and eventually prepare joint contributions to steer standards. There is a broad community addressing various aspects of SDN/NFV/Programmability frameworks.
- Explore and contribute to Open Systems, but provide an architectural framework as a starting point, hence the parenthesis around Open!
- Explore the opportunity of creating IEEE certification services for SDN/NFV to accelerate trust for industrial adoption.
The meeting started with opening remarks from Tim Kostyk (IEEE program
director) and Eileen Healy (SDN Initiative co-chair). They both emphasized the
importance of industrial and academic collaboration, IEEE SDN initiative goals
and outlined the workshop activities. The work we do here will impact the speed
and ubiquity of interoperable software defined networks for decades to come. Cagatay
Buyukkoc then welcomed the group and provided a brief summary of Preindustrial Subcommittee
goals and explained the importance of convergence and Proof of Concepts. The
major thrust was to emphasize 5G Era and how we need to rethink some key
concepts to support and getting ready for future. Towards this end,
collaboration with Princeton University (Prof Mung Chiang group) and Stanford
University (Prof Sachin Katti group) was explained and the POC support for ON.lab
was outlined. Several industry trends were summarized as potential
collaboration with ETSI/MEC and other relevant work in the area of Mobile Edge.
Based on
various collaborations with other SP’s the (Open) Mobile Edge Cloud was defined
as:
An (open) cloud platform that uses some
end-user clients and located at the “mobile edge” to carry out a substantial
amount of storage (rather than stored primarily in cloud data centers) and
computation (including edge analytics, rather than relying on cloud data
centers) in real time, communication (rather than routed over backbone
networks), and control, policy and management (rather than controlled primarily
by network gateways such as those in the LTE core). (Based on largely Prof Mung Chiang work)
Prof Sachin Katti
described their work around the softRAN and how that would fit within the
Mobile Edge Cloud concept of the workshop. The key areas of softRAN are the
deployment of SDN concepts to the RAN. The separation of control plane and data
plane and ability to program and distribute key control plane and data plane
functions across the RAN (actually any location) are key innovative pieces that
will be part of IEEE POCs and trials.
Then Guru Parulkar,
director of ON.Lab described the vision, role and capabilities brought by CORD
framework. CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) is a key new
direction of building an infrastructure using commodity components and enabling
open source and whitebox approaches. It is a revolutionary look at
architectures. The purpose here is to enable introduction of new services at
much faster rates than traditional architectures allow. This was all possible
using the recent SDN/NFV frameworks and the ON-OS that is enabling the
direction. Tom Tofigh presented the Mobile-CORD, extensions to support Mobility
and edge concepts. This is a set of architectures that are consistent with the
vision of IEEE SDN Initiative and our support of the POC to follow in 1Q2016.
There were individual
presentations from Tao Chen (Coherent and TNF views), Douglas Castor, Arun
Jotshi, Laurent Ruckenbusch, Lior Fite, several others.
After this all
participant were invited to talk for a few minutes and everybody participated
in this round of discussions!
In the afternoon, there were team
exercises in which participants worked on some key topics. The suggested topics
that were identified by the participants were:
- Service mobility/Content Distribution,
- Radio, core functions disaggregation & Control loops: what is centralized, what is at the edge?
- Mobility management.
Two separate teams worked through a few hours on the same topics and came
back and presented their findings. Team leads were Ian Smith and Tom Tofigh.
The key results of the workshop are:
- Mobile edge needs a new definition. It should be inclusive and build on existing work elsewhere and prevent divergence through collaborations and joint POCs.
- Leverage cloud concepts at the edge: There is big drive towards this that we must quickly realize using a common architecture for content distribution, data analytics, compute and control & steering applications
- Tactile Internet and IoT with control loops require 1 ms E2E delays, i.e., at most 10 mile from the EU processing.
- The 5G Era is fundamentally refactoring the RAN, Edge and Core architectures, need to judiciously rearchitect E2E functions on common platform and create a Software-Defined ecosystem.
- Some of the work needs to align better with EU Horizon activities
- Cooperate & collaborate globally!
The Preindustrial subcommittee will host
another meeting in about 6 months, and biweekly web meetings going forward. Let’s make this event a beginning for an important
industry collaboration!
Meeting report by: Cagatay Buyukkoc
Please
join IEEE SDN: contact antonio.manzalini@telecomitalia.it