Nokia's research arm, Bell Labs will lead a consortium which includes BT, Orange, vendors, European SMEs and academic institutions to build over the next 24 months the Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service (NGPaaS) for the 5G era.
The consortium is part of the 5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership (5G-PPP), launched in 2014 as an initiative between the European Union and telecom concerns.
Nokia said 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).
Such a platform does not exist today. With NGPaaS, the consortium's goal is to realise the vision of adopting the PaaS model to optimally support cloud-native 5G systems, added the company.
Bessem Sayadi, Consortium Project Leader and Research anager for Nokia Bell Labs
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.
