About
6G-PATH Architecture
The 6G-PATH platform offers significant added values to support vertical businesses in facilitating varied vertical use cases to be deployed and tested, in a number of Beyond 5G (B5G) testbeds across Europe. The main innovations and capabilities of the 6G-PATH platform’s architectural design include the following:
A common unified experimentation portal and experimentation interface to allow vertical use cases to have a homogeneous experience in conducting their experiments in heterogeneous B5G/6G testbeds with distinct features across Europe.
A number of advanced networking, intelligence, security and automation/autonomy features to enable B5G/6G network service developers and vertical businesses to test B5G capabilities that may be essential to “run” their new applications with demanding requirements that may not be feasible in current commercial 5G networks.
Development of a set of experimentation tools and methodologies to allow B5G/6G experimenters measure sets of well-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Value Indicators (KVIs) in several application domains (Farming, Education, Health, and Smart Cities).
These are the highlighted benefits brought by the 6G-PATH platform. These efforts emphasise federation, sustainability, and vertical integration, paving the way for 6G deployment in Europe. 6G-PATH establishes pan-European pilots and trials for both B5G enablers and vertical applications.
Architecture Overview
The figure above shows the overall architecture overview of the 6G-PATH experimentation platform. The lower part of the figure represents nine different 6G testbeds. Every testbed has achieved at least three interfaces to enable it to be plugged into the 6G-PATH experimentation framework. Firstly, the Infrastructure Manager/Orchestrator API/Dashboard allows local resource management within the scope of every testbed. Secondly, the Service Manager/Orchestration API/Dashboard allows local service management in the scope of every testbed. Thirdly, the Monitoring Northbound API/Dashboard allows monitoring of both services and resources in the testbed. These are the preconditions in the participating testbeds.
Furthermore, there are several essential building blocks, as shown in the upper layers (on top of the testbeds) in The figure to facilitate the execution of experiments. Moreover, every testbed is expected to provide advanced 6G-ready experiment features. They are depicted in the right-lower part of the figure, in darker grey. It is noted that not every testbed will have every advanced functionality. The planned advanced 6G-ready functionalities and their availability in the individual testbeds are presented in more detail later.
Essential Building Blocks
In the following, the essential functionalities in the 6G-PATH architecture are introduced in the context of the overall operation of the system.
The 6G-PATH Portal and Northbound Interfaces/API is the entry point for users intending to experiment in any among the available 6G-PATH testbeds. User authentication and authorisation is performed first to ensure that only authorised users can access the system. To this end, it interacts with the AAA (Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting) component of the 6G-PATH architecture. Authenticated and authorised users is then provided with the set of available (registered) testbeds in the 6G-PATH Testbed Repository, from which the user can access to the 6G-PATH Experiment Lifecycle Portal via the respective links. The 6G-PATH Experiment Lifecycle Portal enables the users of an individual testbed to onboard their experiments especially those measuring KPIs and/or KVIs. Thus, the 6G-PATH Northbound API can be seen as a proxy to allow users to interact graphically with the system.
After a user gains access to a testbed, the 6G-PATH Experiment Lifecycle Manager (ELCM) manages the execution of experiments. The ELCM is a core component of the 6G-PATH experimentation framework, based on ETSI TR 103 761. Therefore, experiments are formalised in a test, which ELCM will execute. If a testbed-specific solution is required as part of an experiment, a task for launching and configuring that solution must be included in the experiment executed by the ELCM.
As the central point for experimentation, the ELCM is responsible for coordinating the complete lifecycle of a 6G-PATH experiment. The 6G-PATH Experiment Lifecycle Portal contains an interface (frontend) to allow configuring the ELCM (backend). When the ELCM receives a request to perform the execution of an experiment, it interacts with other components to carry out its task. Firstly, it retrieves the services/images of the use case from the 6G-PATH Use Case Image Repository and triggers the deployment of the use case in the indicated testbed, if the experiment requires the deployment of the services and they are not pre-deployed. Then, the 6G-PATH ELCM interacts with the corresponding testbed to execute the use case images. Consequently, it executes of the different experiment tools in order to conduct a concrete evaluation of the performance within the infrastructure, e.g., using a 6G-PATH Monitoring Tool such as a common monitoring tool like iPerf or a testbed or use case specific tool.
After executing both use case images and test case tools, the results generated from the experiment are stored in the 6G-PATH Monitoring Databases such as InfluxDB. In the test cases, each testbed will include the task of injecting the result data into the Monitoring Databases through a messaging/data streaming mechanism. In the current release of the 6G-PATH framework, Kafka is employed in several testbeds as a messaging backbone for data exchange, while others rely on alternative mechanisms for data collection and communication, depending on their specific infrastructure and requirements. Each testbed implements and configures its own data management setup, accordingly. Monitoring is performed at the testbed level using a combination of common, as well as testbed- or use case-specific, monitoring tools. To ensure interoperability, the Monitoring Tools enable conversion between the native data formats of each testbed and the unified 6G-PATH monitoring format shared across the various testbeds in the framework.
Furthermore, the 6G-PATH Analytics component provides graphical visualisation of monitoring metrics collected during experiment execution, with results displayed through a dedicated dashboard. This dashboard leverages the 6G-PATH Testbed Repository to determine how to access the various Monitoring Databases associated with each testbed, and interacts with the 6G-PATH Northbound Interfaces/API for user authentication and authorisation, ensuring that users can only view results from their own experiments.
It is noted that the 6G-PATH ELCM is instantiated multiple times, one per testbed, to provide experimentation capabilities within the context of the testbed. Moreover, there will be multiple instantiations of the 6G-PATH Monitoring Databases to “keep” the information related to each testbed collected in the same database. Meanwhile, all these databases will have the same data model to allow reusing the same 6G-PATH Experiment Lifecycle Portal dashboard for all the testbeds. Thus, the 6G-PATH Experiment Lifecycle Portal (also referred to as ELCM Portal hereafter) will also be instantiated per testbed and only the users with permission will have access the corresponding dashboard.