M. Zembra’s scientific contributions

Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) systems offer customers a rich environment in which to build, deploy, and run applications. Today's PaaS offerings are tailored mainly to the needs of web and mobile applications developers, and involve a fairly rigid stack of components and features. The vision of the H2020 5GPPP Phase 2 Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service (NGPaaS) project is to enable "build-to-order" customized PaaSs, tailored to the needs of a wide range of use cases with telco-grade 5G characteristics. This paper sets out the salient and innovative features of NGPaaS and explores the impacts on Operational Support Systems and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS), moving from fixed centralized stacks to a much more flexible and modular distributed architecture.

5G standard emerges at a particular time in technology history when cloud transforms deeply almost all industries and services: it becomes obvious that innovations have to be made cloud-native for being successful. 5G must become the ubiquitous fabric blending universal connectivity (to humans, robots, sensors…) with cloud versatility and scalability. For realizing this vision, another model than IaaS must be adopted, the Platform as a Service (PaaS), which should be built to support telco-grade requirements and combine all sort of third-party applications. These are the core objectives of the Next Generation Platform as a Service (NGPaaS) project, a H2020 5G PPP Phase 2 project. The paper presents the project fundamentals, its architectural proposal and most relevant features.