ACROSS Project

Service deployment and management platform for next-generation networks and services

Description

Across project focuses on the development of a service deployment and management platform that will offer optimal levels in terms of performance, energy efficiency, scalability, and automation. The ACROSS project aims to develop an end-to-end service deployment and management platform for next-generation networks and services achieving exceptional levels of efficiency, automation, scalability, and performance. The platform is built as a distributed grid of domain-level orchestrators, spread across multiple geo-dispersed and potentially heterogeneous edge environments which are supervised by a multi-domain orchestrator managed in the cloud. The platform is further enhanced with a) deep end-to-end telemetry to unlock visibility of the intertwined network and compute system states, b) AI-driven intelligence that leverages both the vast number of events originating from the dense IoT ecosystem and detailed monitoring data originating from the ACROSS telemetry sub-system, to generate new insights, c) full-stack cross-domain zero-touch provisioning via programmable “hooks” that exploit events originating from raw telemetry and AI processed events, and d) secure and trusted orchestration mechanisms for trusted computing technologies over large and heterogeneous cloud-edge deployments, as well as orchestration and monitoring of the security VNFs. The ACROSS concept is developed over a federated heterogeneous validation and testing environment that hosts a number of test cases and scenarios for promoting all potential intelligent and trusted zero-touch provisioning processes with different event-triggering origins. The test cases are carefully designed for being promoted as proof of concept (PoC) project submissions to standards and open-source initiatives (targeting but not limited to ETSI ZSM, ETSI NFVOSM, TMF, ONF).

 

Show the Project Objective

ACROSS is a secure E2E network and service management platform that is poised to tame the emerging dynamicity, complexity, performance, and scalability requirements of modern and futuristic services over an ever expanding cloud processing continuum. ACROSS (i) provides an ultra- scalable service orchestration stratum, built as an ensemble of a highly-distributed grid of domain orchestration instances managed by a multi-domain cloud-native service orchestrator to (ii) manage multi-X (i.e., domain, technology, vendor, and tenant) infrastructures spanning across geo- distributed edge-to-core deployments, with (iii) increased security and trust over the underlying swarm of devices and ad-hoc data sources, while (iv) jointly exploiting the underlying data explosion (originating from the ever-growing IoT ecosystem), the elevated data plane programmability, and the exciting momentum of AI to greatly outperform and outsmart existing service orchestration loops. To do so, ACROSS employs vertical and horizontal zero-touch mechanisms, enabling multi-objective service management optimizations in the presence of trade-offs between performance, energy consumption, and cost. ACROSS fosters a democratized cloud continuum ecosystem for the benefit of multiple market stakeholders & business actors, built upon solid principles, such as event  and data-driven microservices, open and standardized APIs, multi-X support, infrastructure agnosticity, service & business model abstractions, enhanced security and trust, and true unsupervised real-time automation using artificial rather than human intelligence. ACROSS will be the first of a new breed of AI-driven zero-touch service deployment and management platforms, fully compliant with existing standards in zero-touch network and service management, with a concrete roadmap of tangible proof-of-concept demonstrations to selected standards (i.e., ETSI ZSM) to further advance standardization in the face of the emerging 6G requirements. Our Role in the Project K3Y leads the development of Across Analytics. This component uses telemetry data and provides storage and real-time analytics for the whole network infrastructure. In particular, K3Y will develop a storage infrastructure to provide automated end-to-end zero-time network analytics like flow statistics and statistics about the network resources. K3Y is also contributing to other tasks, such as the architectural design of the overall platform and AI-powered cybersecurity mechanisms.