Nokia (NYSE:NOK) Bell Labs reported that it will lead a consortium of operators, IT firms, small and medium-sized enterprises, European academic institutions and industry vendors, to build the Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service for the 5G era in the upcoming 24 months. This consortium is part of the 5G-PPP, established in 2014 as a measure between the EU and telecom concerns.
The details
The cloud is deeply changing many industries and service, and at a such time, the advent of 5G standard is of specific importance. As such, advancements have to be cloud-native to excel in the industry, which also indicates there is a compelling requirement of adopting a mechanism beyond the existing telco Infrastructure-as-a-Service model, a Platform-as-a-service model.
An ideal 5G cloud-native platform exhibits two major features. This platform must facilitate shipping, building and running virtual network function applications with telco-grade quality in respect of latency, capacity and reliability, thereby offering the promise of 5G performance.
The platform must also bring together different kinds of third-party apps with those VNF, which will help creating more powerful and versatile cloud objects flouting silos between computing and connectivity. As of now, the market doesn’t have such a platform. With NGPaaS, the consortium’s objective is to realize the objective of adopting the PaaS setup to optimally advance cloud-native 5G systems.
Bessem Sayadi, the Research Manager and Consortium Project Leader, for Nokia Bell Labs, reported that the consortium’s objective for advancing a next-gen PaaS is to allow developers to work together within the 5G ecosystem so as to advance new businesses, and hence improving market economics and increasing market scale.
There are several academia and industry players that are included in the consortium. Nokia Bell Labs has remained a key force in participating and driving in 5G research and industry collaboration. In addition to supporting the next generation PaaS consortium, Nokia Bell Labs is also collaborating with major academic associates and is active in numerous events such as MWC, OpenStack Summit, OPNFV and ICC, to converse with the research community how to attain this goal.
