Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - 5G-MEDIA (Programmable edge-to-cloud virtualization fabric for the 5G Media industry)

Teaser

Media applications are amongst the most demanding services to be run on networks because of the huge amount of resources they require to guarantee higher and higher audio-visual throughputs, the demand for Quality of Service and Quality of Experience for the various mobile...

Summary

Media applications are amongst the most demanding services to be run on networks because of the huge amount of resources they require to guarantee higher and higher audio-visual throughputs, the demand for Quality of Service and Quality of Experience for the various mobile and fixed sensory streams, the need for very high service availability and limited latency for all the new media experiences based on AR/VR. As a 5G PPP phase 2 project, the 5G-MEDIA project is innovating media-related applications and is specifically investigating how these applications and the underlying 5G network should be coupled and interwork to the benefit of both. 5G-MEDIA will deliver an integrated programmable service platform for the development, design and operations of media applications in 5G networks by providing mechanisms to proof and validate services before onboarding as well as to flexibly adapt service operations to dynamic conditions and react upon events (e.g. to transparently accommodate auto-scaling of resources, VNF re-placement, etc.). Three use cases are developed in the project and will be used to demonstrate the benefits of the 5G-MEDIA Platform for service design and virtualization: Use Case 1 “Immersive media and Virtual Reality”, Use case 2 “Smart Production and User-generated Content” and Use Case 3 “Ultra High Definition over Content Delivery Network”.

Work performed

During the first period the focus of the consortium has been mainly on i) the design of the 5G-MEDIA Service Platform architecture and the specification of the related functionalities and interfaces (more details about the architecture are provided in D3.1 and will be available in D2.3), ii) the analysis of the media related application and requirements, and the specification of the three 5G-MEDIA use cases with developments and integration of components for their early validation (as defined in D2.2 and that will be further specified in D6.1). In addition, a set of APIs and tools were setup to support a continuous development and integration framework (DevOps CI/CD) to test and streamline an efficient environment for software development in the media sector (more details can be found in D2.1).

The main building blocks comprising the 5G-MEDIA architecture are shown in the “5G-MEDIA High Level Architecture” picture attached.

The main innovations introduced by 5G-MEDIA are:
* the combination of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) approach with the VNF packaging and the enablement of inserting FaaS VNFs in a typical VNF forwarding graph; more about FaaS will be provided in D3.2
* the NFV MANO platform-agnostic catalogue, which uses a novel generalized and extendible format for representing Network Services (NS) and Virtual Network Functions (VNF) to enable the use of Virtual Functions in federated MANO systems; more about the catalogue will be provided in D4.1
* the integration of the Cognitive Network Optimizer (CNO) as an intelligent tool that processes data collected from NFVIs, VNFs and applications within the Service Virtualisation Platform by the corresponding monitoring mechanisms and that adapts the deployment of VNF forwarding graphs seamlessly to continuously meet expected QoS requirements; more will be provided in D3.3
* the realization of i) the FaaS plugin enabling the on-demand deployment of FaaS VNFs and ii) the OpenNebula VIM plugin to deploy VNFs on the TID Onlife testbed.

The execution of the technical work plan of the project during the first period has also significantly contributed to generate impact in the various community of our stakeholders. Through various coordinated activities for dissemination and communication as well as through contribution to open source, the consortium has gained traction in Europe as one of the frontrunners in the use of 5G capabilities to boost a vertical market such as the media one. Among all, some key results are (more on this is provided in D7.4):
* A total number of 13 scientific publications
* Participation in 28 events, including some of international relevance (i.e. EuCNC 2017, NEM Summit 2017, Mobile World Congress 2018, IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB) 2018, EuCNC 2018)
* Organisation of the workshop “Media delivery innovations using flexible network models in 5G” within the IEEE BMSB 2018
* Contribution to several 5G PPP outcomes such as:
** 5G PPP European 5G Annual Journal 2018
** 5G PPP Software Network WG White Paper “From Webscale to Telco, the Cloud Native Journey”
** 5G PPP Vertical Cartography and Golden Nuggets
* An audience of 480+ followers in Twitter, 290+ followers in LinkedIn and 2500+ unique visitors in our website
* 6 videos produced, registering 450+ views
* integration of OpenNebula VIM into Open Source MANO (5G-MEDIA became an official contributor to the Research activities of OSM)
* submission of pull requests about a lighter version of OpenWhisk with reduced resources footprint suitable for the deployment at the edge in a resource constrained environment.

Final results

5G-MEDIA innovations will be demonstrated through three use cases that has been specified in this period in D2.2 and that will be further refined in D6.1:

* Use case 1 - Immersive media and Virtual Reality: Tele-Immersive (TI) applications are immersive media network based applications that enable the multi-party real-time interaction of users located in different parts of the globe, by placing them inside a shared virtual world
* Use case 2 - Smart Production and User-generated Content: Due to the steadily rising cost pressure, broadcasters are looking for new, low-cost and time-saving production methods, which include participatory and user-generated media in the production(aka smart production)
* Use case 3 - Ultra High Definition over Content Delivery Network: The focus is on how UHD contents by a Media Service Provider (MSP) can serve users on the go and how the MSP can build media distribution service chains made of software defined media functions to properly serve users attached to the 5G network.

Through D7.3, the exploitation approach in 5G-MEDIA has taken into account a market analysis, the individual exploitation plan of each partner, the identification and the analysing of the context in which stakeholders operate and, finally, a preliminary value chain and potential new stakeholders. A refined 5G-MEDIA exploitation plan and the relative Business Model will be worked during the second period of the project timeline and included into D7.5.

Finally, contributions to standards are in a very early stage and planned for the second period, targeting for example:
* ETSI NFV, ETSI MEC, ETSI ZSM - to e.g. continue monitoring the NFV SOL specifications and identify its applicability to the NFV catalogue developed in 5G-MEDIA; to continue monitoring the MEC standard evolution and identify its applicability to 5G-MEDIA; to identify areas for Monitoring, Analysis, Planning and Execution (MAPE) loop automation into Zero touch network & Service Management (ZSM)
* OSM End User Advisory Group (EUAG) and OSM Hackfest – to continue monitoring the OSM releases and to propose the 5G-MEDIA NFV catalogue for integration in future OSM releases
* IETF Network Function Virtualization (nfvrg) – to propose the concept of a flexible and generalized catalogue for SDN and NFV applications and functions.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.5gmedia.eu/.