ACROSS Project

Research-Innovation-Awards-Logo-ACROSS

Co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101097122 and the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU).
• Represented by Georgios P. Katsikas
• Technical Coordinator of ACROSS project
• UBITECH Ltd. (Greece)
• Technical leader of the Networked Systems & Software (NSS) group

ACROSS has delivered valuable early contributions to several ETSI Industry Specification Groups (ISGs) and Software Development Groups (SDGs), actively shaping the technical foundations of future 6G networks.
The focus of this nomination is the project’s significant and sustained impact within ETSI SDG OSL (OpenSlice), where ACROSS played a key role in advancing the OpenSlice multi-domain service orchestrator.

ACROSS introduced new features to the ETSI OpenSlice service orchestrator. These features allow OSL to implement custom closed loops that leverage monitoring data or events stemming from the data plane to trigger custom actions in the form of explicit service and/or network updates or specific policies. Moreover, throughout ACROSS the OSL community identified the need to (i) manage custom Kubernetes resources via OpenSlice (CRIDGE component) and (ii) import external monitoring metrics into OpenSlice (metrico component). Both components were implemented in the context of ACROSS. Finally, ACROSS envisioned a new overlay module on top of OpenSlice to serve as a multi-domain orchestrator. This component is now a new OSL MDG titled Hyper Orchestrator (HypO) based on UBITECH’s former Maestro orchestration platform. The entire HypO codebase will soon be open, while HypO’s extensive documentation is already available online.

All the above contributions demonstrate significant leaps towards automation (at various levels) and secure orchestration, which are very important for the upcoming 6G era.

Throughout ACROSS, both ETSI SDG OSL and ETSI SDG TFS (TeraFlowSDN) substantially enhanced their interoperability, features, and stability, with the ETSI ISG ZSM Proof of Concept (PoC) PoC #16 being the culmination of this work as the PoC was deployed and validated across a Pan-European testbed spanning 3 sites (2 in Greece and 1 in Spain).

Such a PoC increases the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for both platforms, which is another essential factor in creating a stable, sovereign EU software stack ready to address the challenges of future networks. The features that ACROSS introduced to ETSI OSL were demonstrated in various public ETSI events.
The numerous Test Cases developed within ACROSS, particularly TC4 – the ETSI ISG ZSM PoC – represent a major milestone in advancing the vision of large scale deployments of open, standards compliant platforms. The legacy of ACROSS continues as new projects increasingly adopt similar methodologies, contributing to the creation of a sovereign European software stack built on the foundations of three ETSI SDGs (OpenSlice, TeraFlowSDN, and Open Source MANO).

The most impactful project directly leveraging the ACROSS platform is COP-PILOT; a large Innovation Action project featuring Large Scale Pilots across 5 vertical sectors in Europe.