Resilient and Scalable Slicing over Multiple Domains

The main goal of RELIANCE is to extend the 5G network architecture with new functionalities needed for multi-service and multi-domain management, with the related abstractions, interfaces, and mechanisms to support needed resilience, security, and scalability.

RELIANCE aims to conduct research activities on the concept of federated net- work slicing to compose end-to-end services that span across different technical and administrative domains. A key innovation of the project is the highly scalable and robust slice choreography plane that enables the offering of vertical-tailored slices “as-a-Service”, ensuring the required scalability, security, and resilience features. It facilitates the mapping of ser- vice requirements from the verticals with their predicted traffic demands into dedicated networking and cloud resources through automated multiparty negotiation. Scalable slice federation is complemented with protocols for deployment and runtime adaptation of resilience and security mechanisms over heterogeneous infra- structures, so to enable a unified reliability framework.

Approach

The architectural work of RELIANCE is driven by the diverse needs and require- ments stemming from vertical industries (industry 4.0, Smart Cities, Enhanced multimedia broadband & Transportation -train control & management-). The RELIANCE framework will be implemented and validated on selected use-cases through proof-of-concepts, aiming at demonstrating the envisioned benefits of the RELI- ANCE framework.

Main results

RELIANCE is an innovate action which will certainly have strong strategic impact in the industry including verticals beyond the communications industry. The innovation potential of the project spans across multiple complementary areas, involving different stakeholders which would benefit from the different innovations RELIANCE aims to develop. RELIANCE aims to create a dynamic marketplace whereby multiple stakeholders, including infrastructure providers and operators, will provide end- to-end slices for different verticals. The researches on automated service negotiation and contracting mechanisms, provided by RELIANCE, will be the initial step towards trustworthy and reliable federation of compute, storage and connectivity resources from multiple providers.

Impact

The flexibility and agility offered by RELIANCE in the provisioning and management of slices will encourage vertical industry actors to ac- cess this new network slice market place, thus bridging the gap be- tween verticals and telco indus- tries. In addition, the creation of these novel business interactions and models will enable verticals to either deploy new customized ser- vices or improve existing ones, thus strengthening their positions in their respective markets. This is also reflected on the telco industry side, whereby operators will have opportunities to engage new cus- tomers from the vertical sectors with more appealing service offerings. Moreover, the extremely- flexible and agile RELIANCE approach, based on recursive abstraction and virtualisation of resources, will enable network operators to improve their products portfolio beyond network connectivity services.