UBITECH hosts the kick-off meeting, in Athens, Greece (September 14, 2018) of the ARMONIA Greek research project, officially started on August 1st, 2018. The project is co-funded by the action “Researching-Creating-Innovating” (under the instrument “Partnerships of Enterprises with Research Organizations”) of the operational programme for Research, Technological Development and Innovation of the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religion Matters (Grant Agreement No. T1EDK-05061) and spans on the period August 2018 – January 2021. The ARMONIA project proposes the realization of the self-configured and unified access and metro network that will support the increasing traffic load and the requirements of emerging applications, enabling the redesign and upgrade of different segments of the network, as well as the re-configuration of equipment – without the involvement of manual operations that result in high capital (CAPEX) and operation expenditures (OPEX).
As a matter of fact, ARMONIA network senses itself, and dynamically acts to (re-)optimize itself in almost real time. The optical and IP equipment of the different segments of the network converge and are jointly and optimally controlled, leveraging the software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies. Monitoring information from the network is collected and analyzed with big data analytics methods. This in turn is used by dynamic algorithms that decide how to adapt and dynamically optimize the unified network. Required network functions are virtualized and optimally placed. ARMONIA implements an observe-decide-act closed control loop which achieves unprecedented resource efficiency and provides advanced virtualization services, reducing the CAPEX and OPEX and lowering the barriers for the introduction of new services.
Within this context, apart from the overall project management and consortium coordination of ARMONIA, the R&D team of UBITECH will drive the design and implementation of the policy-aware orchestrator that will rely on novel software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies to optimally control the unified access and metro network.
