Digital Business Transformation mean a number
of objectives for Network Operators and Service Providers: saving Operational costs,
reducing Time to Market, improving de-commissioning procedures, improving the
“quality of service” but also becoming ready for providing new ICT services,
even those which are still unpredictable today. In a sentence, Telecommunications
infrastructures should become “good enough” to be economically sustainable in
highly dynamic and changing scenarios.
We know that SDN-NFV are considered today two
of the most promising enabling technologies to achieve these goals. However, the
target of increasing the levels of flexibility and programmability will
determine, in turn (reverse side of the coin), higher and higher levels of
management “complexity”: in fact, rather than managing sets of closed physical
nodes and systems, it will be necessary allocating and orchestrating a huge
number of software tasks, logically intertwined and dynamically moving.
There is also an overall consensus that 5G production
(and beyond) environment will look like distributed clouds of IT systems, interconnected
through ultra-low latency (radio and wired) connections, capable of executing
software processes and applications, dynamically meeting Customers’ needs. As a
matter of fact, already today we’re witnessing the interweaving of technologies
such as Edge and Fog Computing with SDN and NFV. And “Softwarization” will
allow decomposing the network and service functions into chains of software
tasks. End-to-end service provisioning will require that this functional
decomposition will be followed by an optimal allocation and orchestration of
the virtualized functionalities across User Equipment, RAN, Mobile Edge and
Core resources. Eventually, this will bring a unified service
modeling whereby SDN services (e.g., controllers), NFV services (e.g., Virtual
Network Functions), and Cloud services
are seen as “application” executed on virtualized resources.
TOSCA (Topology and
Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) will be a natural candidate
for the Northbound interfaces of the Real-time Operating Platforms. TOSCA is a standard from OASIS that targets
interoperable deployment and lifecycle management of cloud services. In fact, TOSCA
uses the concept of service templates to describe cloud workloads as a topology
template. The topology template describes the structure of a service as a set
of node templates and relationship templates modeling the relations as a
directed graph. Node templates and relationship templates (linking different
nodes) in fact specify properties and operations (via interfaces) to manipulate
the service components. Moreover, it is likely that the YANG declarative data modeling
language will be used both to describe deployable instances of a service (e.g.,
a VNF) and to configure a network device/element at run time.
Eventually, TOSCA
and NetConf /YANG could be considered as complementary instruments: deployment
templates may trigger the NetConf /YANG
configurations during the instantiation of a service, whist in the Operations
the Real Time Operating Platforms can take over configurations at run time. On
the Southbound interface a number of well-known configuration protocols and
programming language are getting momentum: OpenFlow, NetConf, P4, etc.
At the same time we’re witnessing a growing diffusion of Internet of
Things and Machine to Machine communications are creating also a new generation
of non-human Customers’, such as Robots, Avatars and any sort of Artificial
Intelligence applications. This “complexity”, outstripping
human control and operations ability, will be tamed only by exploiting
real-time Operating Platforms, based on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) methods
and systems, integrating management, control and orchestration functions. It
will be necessary collecting, filtering and elaborating the infrastructure Big
Data, thus “closing the loop” and making the them truly “actionable” for
Operations and provisioning of services.
Real-time Operating Platforms should provide an abstraction layer for
switching/networking (e.g., Switch, Ports, Links) and compute, storage
resources (e.g., CPU, RAM, Disk, Ports, etc.). This allows applications and
developers to request connectivity, storages and arbitrary units of compute
power without one having to worry about how this translates to bare-metal,
Containers or Virtual Machines. Eventually this evolution will
impact deeply the current value chain: in fact, Telecommunications infrastructures,
governed by real-time Operating Platforms, will become a single converged
industrial structures covering voice, Internet access and other services a la
OTT.
In this big leap towards Artificially
Intelligent Networks, a new Community will have to be developed capable of
integrating Experts in Computer Science, Telecommunications-ICT, A.I. and
Applied Mathematics.