Development & Reliable Orchestration of Network Applications for the Automotive Domain Across the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum

The latest advancements in mobile networks, extending beyond the 5G trends, have had a substantial impact on the vertical automotive sector. These advancements have empowered the development of Network Applications and simplified the provision of new services. Container orchestration technologies allow deploying highly distributed services, spanning from the cloud to far-edge devices embedded in vehicles (i.e., the On Board Units). Requirements like high availability and reliability are usually critical for automotive services, as they are heavily affected by any potential discontinuity in mobile connectivity. The 5G-IANA Framework simplifies the development and testing of Network Applications capable to exploit the reliability of 5G networks. It provides a multi-domain orchestration system for zero-touch provisioning and configuration of Network Applications over multi-cluster computing infrastructures extended towards edge resources and far-edge devices. This paper presents the orchestration system, analyzing its role in the 5G-IANA Automotive Open Experimentation Platform (AOEP) and its involvement in conducting trials to evaluate automotive services by third-party experimenters. Additionally, it provides a description of an Automotive Network Application running on Nokia’s 5G infrastructure, which hosts both an instance of the platform and the applications deployed on top of it.