ANEMONE - Scalable and decentralized management of open 6G networks

The substantial increase in computing power of general purpose devices combined with the ever increasing traffic demands that stress service provider networks is leading to an accelerated convergence of software and networks. And this applies to all network segments including RAN, edge, transport, core, and cloud. On the networking side, this resulted in the softwarization of control (SDN) and data plane (NFV) as well as other relevant associated technologies (e.g., open disaggregated RANs). On the software/application side, this resulted in the decomposition of hitherto monolithic applications into large and highly distributed microservice meshes that become complex application-layer networks themselves.  Solving the mismatch between how applications and how networks are evolving to serve the needs of such applications is one of the main goals of ANEMONE. Taming the inherent complexity of ANEMONE systems requires automated management frameworks that introduce control loops at various components of such systems. Therefore, in the same way components are becoming decentralized, so are the associated management systems. The ANEMONE project also strives to define such coordinated conflict-free management decentralization. This will have an architectural and algorithmic impact on multiple building blocks and functionalities, such as Open RAN, RRM, dynamic spectrum management, decentralized autonomous network management, or SLA management. Simulation and experimental validation of the proposed ideas is also part of ANEMONE.