Page 216 - ITU-T Focus Group IMT-2020 Deliverables

3 ITU-T Focus Group IMT-2020 Deliverables

III Service Platform Functionality

• Main Function Name: Service Platform: service platform realizes the management functionality to
deploy, provision, manage, scale, and place services on the actual infrastructure. It does not execute
the services themselves; it rather triggers execution on the actual infrastructure by requiring start-
up, migration, shutdown, etc of (virtual) network functions on the actual infrastructure.

III.1 Service Platform Primitives
• Function Name: Infrastructure Abstraction – assuming no uniform control interface has appeared, a
shim layer functionality to hide idiosyncrasies of an infrastructure. This should be lightweight
function and hopefully will disappear once standards emerge.

• Function Name: Conflict Resolution: Since service-specific logics are likely selfish, conflicts over
resource usage will arise.
• Function Name: Service Platform Scalability: The service platform must be scalable to support a very
large number of devices (e.g., sensors), a high traffic load, high dynamics etc. depending on the use
case.
• Function Name: Service Platform Customizability: The service platform must be customizable to
support large-scale, complex deployments (such as carrier networks) as well as smaller, lightweight
deployments (such as enterprises or industrial networks).
• Function Name: Capability Discovery in Service Platform: The service platform, notably the
infrastructure abstraction layer, must support the discovery of capabilities of the physical
infrastructure, e.g. support for hardware-acceleration for certain functions such as encryption or
the availability of a Zigbee interface. That way, it will become possible to optimize function
placement and maybe even tune applications that have access to the capability-enriched network
model via the service platform.
• Function Name: Isolation constraints for VNFs: The programming model must support isolation
constraints for VNFs. This is in terms of performance, e.g. in order to guarantee min. capacity
without being pre-empted by concurrent services. But it is also in terms of security, e.g. in order to
restrict visibility of (virtual or real) infrastructure to a particular service, or to constrain a service to
specific time windows (e.g., only between 10am and 11am, or expiry one hour after first use).
• Function Name: Multi-tenancy: Some components can be dedicated to a tenant (hard isolation) and
some other can be shared (soft isolation).
• Function Name: Security VNF availability: Security virtual network functions require specific
capabilities that are not so common in generic VNF, like Anti DDoS or signature detection of IDS.
These functionalities must be present to allow creating a valid use case. IMT-2020 VNF Catalogue
must include some Security VNFs.
• Function Name: Personalized VNF: VNF catalogue and management framework in IMT-2020 must
support the concept of “personal” in the sense that VNFs are assigned as a non-shareable resource
with other users in the platform. Also Users identities in IMT-2020 framework must allow a direct
mapping between user and his VNFs case.

III.2 Service Platform Tools
• Function Name: Catalogues and repositories: a service (along with its constituting parts: logics,
NFVs) is placed into corresponding catalogues inside the service platform, from where both kernel
and actual infrastructure can access them. The catalogues hold known entities; they are
complemented by repositories, which hold information about running entities as well as other
frequently updating data, e.g., monitoring data.
• Function Name: GateKeeper: This service platform function will check whether a service can be
executed by the service platform before accepting it. It will check, e.g., authorization of a developer
submitting a service, completeness of the service description, or the availability of all NFVs
composing the service.

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