2024 ETSI SNS4SNS - Open Source for Telco Cloud Demo

ACROSS participated with a poster and demo at the ETSI SNS4SNS event, held from November 12 to 14, 2024, in Sophia Antipolis, France. The demo, titled 'Open Source for Telco-Cloud: An ETSI SDG-based solution to facilitate zero-touch, multi-slice 5G deployments across the cloud-edge continuum,' showcased innovative solutions for seamless deployments.
The increasing demand for network services has prompted telecommunications companies (telcos) to modernize their legacy and unadaptable infrastructure and adopt modular and scalable software-defined systems running on common off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. This software-defined cloud infrastructure, known as “telco cloud”, allows telcos to swiftly deploy services, adapt to changes in the network demand and manage resources across the cloud-edge continuum. While Network Function Virtualization (NFV) marked the initial shift to cloud-based operations, telcos now seek the transition towards cloud-native infrastructure to support the potential of microservices architectures brought by 5G. The proposed demonstration illustrates a zero-touch delivery of a distributed 5G network across a cloud-edge continuum over multiple cloud providers, by integrating three open-source solutions of ETSI Software Development Groups (SDGs) - OSM, TFS, and OSL. To that extent, the demonstration involves the logical interconnection of public and private resources providing an adjustable and seamless network fabric over numerous network devices. Over this zero-touch created network substrate, the adopted open-source solution orchestrates the deployment of disaggregated cloud-native 5G resources, composing a multi-slice setup while also addressing access control on domain resources. In addition, the solution employs stratum-based, programmable P4 switches to not only carry out the routing but also perform in-band network monitoring for deep visibility into the network state. In principle, the demonstrated solution relies on widely utilized, standard interfaces and data models such as TMF APIs, IETF L2/L3 VPN Service Delivery, and ETSI SOL005 to achieve those objectives.