Innovation for Infrastructure as a Service

The UK telecommunications industry is facing several challenges, including rapid technological changes, regulatory and policy interventions, and intense competition, which are affecting profitability and sustainability. The current infrastructure investment and ownership model of building, owning, and maintaining networks in silos is making 5G investment unprofitable, leading to declining or flat revenues within the industry. To address this challenge, the industry needs to define new business models that can deliver connectivity that is economically sustainable and profitable.

This project advances the use of telecoms orchestration software to enable infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This solution can automate the deployment and management of network functions and services across different infrastructure providers, making it easier to access and utilise IaaS resources. Infrastructure sharing models are known to help telecom operators reduce their capital expenditures on physical infrastructure, and with the use of orchestration software these can be used to improve network scalability and flexibility. Overall this solution will allow service providers to respond more quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs.

This project expands the scope of Cell-Stack, an already available distributed network management and orchestration based on multi-agent software architecture used to digitise and manage telecommunications assets: from power management, to bare-metal or vitualised infrastructure assets to passive assets such as towers or street furniture. The tool is further advanced to enable opportunistic access to telecoms infrastructure using as-a-service models. In particular, the design, integration and testing of two new modules or agents: Monitoring and Identity. The Cell-Stack Monitoring module, which allows gathering and managing real-time infrastructure and network data which will improve real-time decision making with real time data from shared infrastructure. The second is the Cell-Stack Identity module, which integrates zero trust for secure on-demand "as a service" infrastructure integration. As a result, Cell-Stack will enable secure management and integration of networks that exist in multiple domains. This solution will be tested with the integration of two 5G Private Networks.