In pursuit of a flexible, resource efficient and highperformant 5G infrastructure, many operators, vendors and research consortia are currently developing, testing and integrating their NFV platform with associated management and orchestration (MANO) functionality. The SONATA NFV platform follows a micro-service design, which involves a tight coupling between an SDK, monitoring and MANO functionality, targeting a secure and stable software foundation. This experience paper gives a thorough overview on the encountered challenges, insights and resulting learnings when implementing and integrating the SONATA Service Platform using a continuous integration and delivery DevOps methodology. This is the result of a strong cooperation between prominent equipment vendors, network operators, software companies and universities, providing a set of constructive recommendations in hope of catalysing the development and deployment of NFV platforms.

Recently Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have evolved considerably towards real world applications, going beyond entertaining activities and use. With the advent of Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks and the number of UAVs to be increased significantly, it is created the opportunity for UAVs to participate in the realisation of 5G opportunistic networks by carrying 5G Base-Stations to under-served areas, allowing the provision of bandwidth demanding services, such as Ultra High Definition (UHD) video streaming, as well as other multimedia services. Among the various improvements that will drive this evolution of UAVs, energy efficiency is considered of primary importance since will prolong the flight time and will extend the mission territory. Although this problem has been studied in the literature as an offline resource optimisation problem, the diverse conditions of a real UAV flight does not allow any of the existing offline optimisation models to be applied in real flight conditions. To this end, this paper discusses the amalgamation of UAVs and 5G cellular networks as an auspicious solution for realising energy efficiency of UAVs by offloading at the edge of the network the Flight Control System (FCS), which will allow the optimisation of the UAV energy resources by processing in real time the flight data that have been collected by onboard sensors. By exploiting the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) architectural feature of 5G as a technology enabler for realising this offloading, the paper presents a proof-of-concept implementation of such a 5G-enabled UAV with softwarized FCS component at the edge of the 5G network (i.e., the MEC), allowing by this way the autonomous flight of the UAV over the 5G network by following control commands mandated by the FCS that has been deployed at the MEC. This proof-of-concept 5G-enabled UAV can support the execution of real-time resource optimisation techniques, a step-forward from the currently offline-ones, enabling in the future the execution of energy-efficient and advanced missions.

Although network function virtualization redefined the role of the network service developer, existing concepts that are supposed to enable them are still limited, cumbersome and time consuming in regard to the promised flexibility. This article describes how to move forward from these initial steps, identifies the challenges network service developers face both during development and runtime, and explains how to overcome them with our service construction kit (SCK) and programmable MANO framework. We detail how our SCK facilitates the service creation process, resulting in two enhanced NFV DevOps cycles, test flexibility and quicker service development. We elaborate on our programmable MANO framework with both architectural considerations and a use case, to depict its customisability by network service developers, giving them finegrained control over their service throughout its end-to-end operational lifecycle.

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Any non-trivial network service requires service specific orchestration to meet its carrier-grade requirements regarding resiliency, availability, etc. How the network service components are mapped on the substrate, how VNFs get reconfigured after a monitored event or how they scale, only network service/function developers know how to execute such workflows to guarantee an optimal QoS. It is therefore of paramount importance that NFV Service Platforms allow developer specified input when performing such life cycle events, instead of defining generic workflows. Within the scope of the SONATA and 5GTANGO projects, a mechanism was designed that allows developers to create and execute Service and Function Specific Managers. These managers are processes, created by the developer, that define service or function specific orchestration behaviour. The SONATA Service Platform executes these managers to overwrite generic Service Platform behaviour, creating developer customised life cycle workflows. We will demonstrate the development, testing and operational execution of these managers by using a Content Delivery Network which requires specific placement and scaling behaviour.