Nokia Bell Labs will lead a consortium of vendors, operators, IT companies, small and medium-sized enterprises and European academic institutions in the development over the next 2 years of the Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service (NGPaaS) for the 5G era.
The NGPaaS consortium is part of the 5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership (5G-PPP), launched in 2014 as an initiative between the European Union and telecoms industry.
Nokia noted that the cloud is transforming many industries and services, leading to the need for innovations to be cloud-native in order to be successful, which necessitates the adoption of a model beyond the current telco Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): a Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.
Such a 5G cloud-native platform needs to offer two key features:
1. To facilitate building, shipping and running of virtual network function (VNF) applications with telco-grade quality in terms of latency, reliability and capacity, in line with the requirements of 5G performance.
2. The ability to combine all types of third-party applications with those VNFs to create more versatile and powerful cloud objects and break down silos between connectivity (for people, robots and sensors) and computing (machine learning, big data and video applications).
The NGPaaS consortium's goal is to enable adoption of the PaaS model to optimally support cloud-native 5G systems.
Industry and academic members of the consortium include: Nokia Bell Labs France; Nokia; ATOS (Spain); BT (UK); Orange (France); Virtual Open Systems (France); Vertical M2M (France); B-COM (France); ONAPP (UK); the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy); Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU); and IMEC (Belgium).
Nokia Bell Labs has been a key player in 5G research and industry collaboration, and views PaaS as an essential platform for service providers seeking to leverage the carrier cloud as they evolve their networks. In addition to leading the NGPaaS consortium, Nokia Bell Labs is also cooperating with academic partners and is participating in events such as ICC, MWC, OpenStack Summit and OPNFV to support efforts to achieve this goal.
