Nokia Bell Labs, the industrial research arm of the Finnish technology giant, has said it is collaborating with a variety of stakeholders for the next generation of 5G platform as a service (NGPaaS).
The collaboration includes industry vendors, operators, IT companies, small and medium sized enterprises, as well as European academic institutions, to dedicate 24 months towards the advance of 5G. The group, known as 5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership (5G-PPP) mediates between the EU and telecom concerns.
The increasing inclination of companies towards cloud technologies is complementing the timing of 5G development in the market, making it essential for new innovations to be cloud-native. This calls for adopting a model beyond the current telco Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model: a Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.
Such a 5G cloud-native platform has two key features:
- An ideal 5G cloud-native platform must facilitate building, shipping and running virtual network function (VNF) applications with ’telco-grade’ quality in terms of latency, reliability and capacity, thereby delivering the promise of 5G performance.
- It must also combine all sorts of third-party applications with those VNF, thereby creating more versatile and powerful cloud objects breaking silos between connectivity (to humans, robots, sensors, etc.) and computing (machine learning, big data, video applications).
Though such a model is non-existent at the moment, the consortium envisions making it a reality with NGPaaS.
Bessem Sayadi, consortium project leader and research manager for Nokia Bell Labs, said: “The consortium’s ambition for developing a next generation PaaS is to enable developers to collaborate within the 5G ecosystem (operator, vendor, third party) in order to ignite new businesses; thereby increasing market scale and improving market economics.”
