Automated zero-touch cross-layer provisioning framework for 5G and beyond vertical services

The ACROSS project designs and implements an end-to-end service deployment and management platform for next-generation networks and services, aiming at unprecedented levels of automation, performance, scalability, and energy efficiency.

At its basis, the platform is built as a highly-distributed grid of domain-level orchestrators, spread across multiple geo-dispersed and potentially heterogeneous edge environments, overseen by a cloud-managed multi-domain orchestrator.

The use of standardised communication interfaces fosters separation of concerns (events) between the two orchestration layers through an integration fabric which ensures compliance with ongoing standardisation efforts.

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 NFV-OSM, TMF, ONF).