To illustrate the platform performance and the “build-to-order” principle, several use cases will be supported in the telco and the vertical domains. These uses cases should be highly representative of the advanced capabilities of the platform. The telco use-case demonstrates the ‘X-as-a-Service’ Where X ∈ {RAN, EPC, xHaul}. The second use-case is related to IoT through two scenarios: energy monitoring and Intelligent agriculture. The third use-case shows a mix of telco and third party IoT components (e.g. local analytics). Heterogeneous IaaS will be considered.
In the early stages of the NGPaaS project, all partners in the consortium were invited to propose at least one-use case scenario to ensure coverage of a diverse and complementary range of NGPaaS properties, and covering business scenarios from different industry segments. Figure 1 shows an illustrative overview of the candidate use cases, how they link together and their relationship to industry segments.
Figure 1: Overview of Use Cases Applicable to NGPaaS
The different use-cases can be categorized as follows:
- “Business-Oriented” which involve network functions directly underpinning services consumed by end users in the eco-system, and covering distinct market segments:
- Telco Fixed
- Telco Mobile (including 5G architectures)
- IoT (covering smart cities and energy management verticals)
- “Operations and Management” geared towards operational capabilities required for a complete “Telco-grade” solution, e.g. monitoring, reporting, resiliency, etc.
- “Test & Validate” geared towards Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) aspects of NGPaaS to enable agile and flexible on-boarding, test and validation of artefacts and functions (that in turn, may be linked to Business-Oriented or Operational capabilities).
- “Infrastructure-Oriented” targeted towards specific hardware and infrastructure capabilities required for applications that need low latency and associated performance guarantees, hence make use of dedicated hardware offload with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
At a high-level, a “build-to-order” PaaS based on the NGPaaS paradigm can be used by distinct “Vertical” businesses who will more than likely be some kind of Service Provider. The way in which NGPaaS is “consumed” by a Service Provider relates to their business scenario, and indeed these are described in terms of the “Business-oriented” use case.
An individual business scenario can encompass a number of distinct components, which we can describe as “Use Case Capabilities”. By including the term “Capability”, we promote and allow nesting of the partner-proposed “Use Cases” to be included and re-used where applicable within different business scenarios; Figure 2 shows a pictorial representation of the NGPaaS Use Cases and Business Scenario groupings.
Figure 2: Logical Groupings of Candidate NGPaaS Business Scenarios
As also illustrated in Figure 2, some of the “Use Case Capabilities” are not directly related to services, but instead are indirectly used to underpin the development/instantiation of those services:
- Operations and Management
- Testing and Validation
- Infrastructure-Oriented
There are three very broad market sectors denoted “Telco Fixed”, “Telco Mobile” and “IoT”. Within some of these sectors, more granular vertical markets – and hence business scenarios – exist (illustrated as pink tiles). For example, within the Telco Mobile sector, we have two candidate business scenarios, one involving content services and the other based on mission-critical capabilities for emergency services (e.g. Mission Critical Push-to-Talk/MCPTT). In the IoT sector, we show “Energy” and “Smart Cities” vertical business scenarios, and there is no reason why NGPaaS cannot be further extended to additional business verticals (e.g. IoT Agriculture, Automotive, etc). Indeed, further levels of granularity are also possible within the Telco-fixed VNFaaS use cases as multiple Vertical Service Provider tenants may require separately-customised PaaS solutions.
Within the distinct business scenarios (corresponding to a vertical service provider making use of NGPaaS), there are distinct “blocks” which correspond to the use case capabilities, individually proposed by the project partners.
The use case capabilities that are labelled as “Ops-oriented” (e.g. “Problem-Detection-as-a-Service” and “Resilient-VNF-as-a-Service”), or “Test/validate” (e.g. “Development-Environment-as-a-Service” and “Profiling-as-a-Service”,) can be leveraged and re-used within most of the multiple vertical business scenarios, since they all aim to exploit common development/operational characteristics of the NGPaaS framework.
The use case capabilities that are “Infrastructure-oriented” (e.g. “Hardware-acceleration-as-a-Service”), are applicable to some, but not all, of the vertical business scenarios. This is because some scenarios require specific hardware capabilities (e.g. mobile network infrastructure components like RAN/EPC), whereas others can be satisfied by general-purpose compute (e.g. VNF-as-a-Service, is infrastructure-agnostic).
The use case capabilities that are “Business-oriented” mainly correspond to VNFs/Applications that are unique to the specific vertical business scenario delivering specific services to end consumers of those services, and so do not re-appear multiple times.