Description

CHARITY aspires to leverage the benefits of intelligent, autonomous orchestration of cloud, edge, and network resources, to create a symbiotic relationship between low and high latency infrastructures that will facilitate the needs of emerging applications.

These intelligence tools, that potentially tackle any kind of highly interactive class of services and applications, will be validated against a wide class of highly anticipated applications characterized by extreme levels of interaction and data exchange between the end users and application components, i.e., AR, VR and Holography applications.

The main outcome of CHARITY will be a community-driven, open-source framework consisting of:

• A system for the autonomous orchestration and life cycle management of a wide range of compute and network resources, and infrastructures that is not dependent on a single large vendor yet remains compatible with all.
• A collection of tools, mechanisms and algorithms enabling the efficient, contextualized and network-aware exploitation of edge resources and application reconfiguration.
• A set of VNFs along with a VNF repository that will support highly interactive applications leveraging on tools, technologies and platforms stemming from fields such as big data.
• Tools for the application providers to simplify the deployment and management of application components, targeting mainly the needs of SMEs (DevOps automations, specifications, APIs and best practices).

CHARITY’s general architecture is organized into five main layers. The bottom layer of this architecture consists of end-user devices and multiple administrative clouds and edges, whereby the collaborative and interactive services run. The second layer consists of Network Function Layer (NFL) and CI/CD CHARITY framework components. This layer enables the network slice “breathing” by managing vertical/horizontal scaling and service relocation whenever receiving commands from upper layers due to a detected degradation in QoE, as well as an ecosystem to the NextGen developers for developing, testing, and integrating their microservices to a public repository. The third layer is the Network Slicing Layer (NSL) aimed at providing network slice management for collaborative and interactive applications running across multiple administrative and technological domains. The fourth layer consists of two components, which are: i) the Application Management Framework providing CHARITY with operations support system (OSS) functionalities; ii) The Convergence and Abstraction Layer providing end-to-end multi-domain network orchestration functions, allowing to orchestrate and manage all the network slices, and ensure their isolation and coordination. Finally, the Network Security and User Privacy layer is a cross layer that assess the security and privacy of the overall CHARITY architecture, ranging from AR, VR and Holography based applications security and privacy, to the foundations of the new edge/cloud computing, SDN, NFV and ETSI ZSM emerging concepts.