A scientific paper entitled “Separation of Concerns among Application and Network Services Orchestration in a 5G Ecosystem” has been authored by UBITECH, University of Genoa and University of Bristol, and is presented at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EUCNC) that is going to take place in Ljubljana at 18-21 of June 2018. In this paper, Panagiotis Gouvas, Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, Eleni Fotopoulou, Thanos Xirofotos and their co-authors detail a novel holistic framework tackling the overall lifecycle of 5G-ready applications design, development, deployment and orchestration over application-aware network slices, highlighting the separation of concerns among the related stakeholders per layer of the proposed architecture.
In particular, the design and development of 5G-ready applications is based on the adoption of set of principles related to the development of Cloud-native applications, as well as concepts related to independent orchestration and infrastructure-agnostic-oriented aspects. The detailed approach is based on three layers, namely the Applications Layer, the 5G-ready Application Orchestration Layer and the Programmable 5G Infrastructure Slicing and Management Layer, with distinct functionalities per layer and clear separation of concerns with regards to the involved stakeholders per layer, as well as any cross-layer interaction. The overall design is based on the specification of open interfaces and APIs as well as on the integration and exploitation of evolving open-source orchestration frameworks for applications (e.g. service mesh approaches) and network services (e.g. NFV orchestrators).
