SONATA

www.sonata-nfv.eu

Contact: SONATA-Contact@5g-ppp.eu

Achievements

SONATA has had a clear influence in the NFV ecosystem, as it was the first NFV integrated approach that included service composition, testing and orchestration.

SONATA has addressed the significant challenges associated with the development and deployment of the complex services envisioned for 5G networks, targeting both the flexible programmability of software networks and the optimisation of their deployments. Identified with the MANO layer of the ETSI architecture, it was not just focused on the management and operations side of NFV but it also extended deeply into the service creation area.

SONATA has contributed to:

• The reduction of time to market for networked services, with its Service Development Kit (SDK) for service developers to easily create and deploy networked services. It has also promoted a DevOps model to integrate development and operations management of virtual services.
• The optimisation of resources utilization and cost of service deployment and operation reduction, developing a Service Platform able to orchestrate and map complex services to connectivity, computing and storage resources, and to automatically re-configure running services.
• Acceleration the adoption of software networks in industry, supporting the full lifecycle of the services and allowing NFV integration and interoperability with already existing network management systems.

The project selected three pilots for the validation and evaluation of its results: Virtual Content Delivery Network (vCDN), Personal Security Application (PSA) and Hierarchical Service Provider (HSP) and Multi-orchestrator and slicing. All pilots provided also capabilities that went beyond the basic functionality of SONATA platform: vCDN pilot innovations were mainly related to the vCDN service deployment optimisation and service resource management during runtime; PSA pilot innovations were mainly related to additional security-related services, specifically anonymity and safe browsing; HSP pilot innovations were mainly related to the multi MANO interworking, SP recursiveness of the service on-boarding and abstraction layer and slice management.

In addition, two other activities were considered of added-value for the project demonstration:

• SONATA contribution with a variant of the vCDN pilot to the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) programme for showcasing advancements in the NFV domain operated by the ETSI Industry Specification Group on Network Functions Virtualization (ETSI ISG NFV).
• The participation with SONATA MANO solution to the ETSI NFV Plugtest, one of the most prominent NFV interoperability events of the moment.

Impact

The open source nature of SONATA results has been innovative among EC projects. SONATA 3.1, the latest software release of the project, is published under Apache v2.0 licence in a public GitHub repository, freely available for download and ready to be installed with full rights for adoption, modification and distribution. Apart from SONATA´s automated installation process, the project followed the best practices of open source software development, quality assurance and testing in order to produce reliable, stable and high quality code.

To create the widest impact possible with its open source approach, SONATA partners actively engaged and collaborated with the key open source communities to the project. This bore fruit, with the adoption of the SONATA’s emulator as part of the OSM Release THREE and our service validation tool planned for inclusion in the next OSM release, OSM Release FOUR. For the SONATA emulator contribution, we received the “ETSI outstanding technical contributor award”.

The active involvement of some partners in several relevant standardization bodies was crucial for the project´s contribution to standards bodies such as ETSI NFV, ITU-T, IETF and IRTF, where the project went beyond just providing feedback in aspects related to orchestration, the original scope of the project, but it has also contributed topics such as architecture or slicing. As clear example of the influence of the project here, we can highlight that four of our contributions to ITU-T became recommendations. In addition, our participation in discussions related to zero-touch management was also important, playing the project an instrumental role in the creation of the new ZTSM ISG in ETSI.

The project also actively contributed to the 5G PPP community by 1) leading the Software Networks WG and active participating in three others, 2) collaborating with other phase 1 projects, where one of our main achievements were the SONATA/5GEX joint pilot, a unique example of close integration of the results from two H2020 projects, and 3) liaising with some phase 2 projects in order to support them in their decision for using a particular service development and/or orchestration platform and build on top, which resulted in the adoption of the SONATA platform by the 5GTANGO project and some other projects currently exploring our platform and its potential uptake.

During its lifetime, SONATA was represented in more than 30 events, international conferences and workshops, leaving tracks on different countries all over the world. The Best Demo Paper Award 2017 that the SONATA demonstration “A Flexible Multi-PoP Infrastructure Emulator for Carrier-grade MANO Systems” received at the IEEE NetSoft is well indicator of the quality of our engagement and participation at these events.

Regarding publications, the project has delivered a total of 66 publications (5 articles in Journals, 27 Publications in Conference proceedings and Workshops, 29 (Pre) Standards Publications, 4 Contributions to 5G PPP white papers and 1 Chapter “DevOps for 5G Network Function Virtualization” in the book “5G Networks: an European Vision” book to be published by River Publishers in August 2018).

Finally, the presence of the project on the Internet and social media channels was impressive, being one of the most active H2020 Phase 1 Projects, if we have into account our contributions to the 5G PPP social media channels.

Project Participants:

.