ANIMA WG B. Liu INTERNET-DRAFT S. Jiang Intended Status: Standard Track Huawei Technologies Expires: April 25, 2019 X. Xiao A. Hecker Z. Despotovic MRC, Huawei Technologies October 22, 2018 Information Distribution in Autonomic Networking draft-liu-anima-grasp-distribution-09 Abstract This document discusses the requirement of capability of information distribution among autonomic nodes in autonomic networks. In general, information distribution can be categorized into two different modes: 1) one autonomic node instantly sends information to other nodes in the domain; 2) one autonomic node can publish some information and then some other interested nodes can subscribe the published information. In the former case, information data will be generated and consumed instantly. In the latter case, however, information data shall be stored in the network and retrieved when necessary. These capabilities are fundamental and basic to a network system and an autonomic network infrastructure (ANI) should consider to integrate them, rather than assisted by other transport or routing protocols (HTTP, BGP/IGP as bearing protocols etc.). Thus, this document clarifies possible use cases and requirements to ANI so that information distribution can be natively supported. Possible options to realize the information distribution function are also briefly discussed. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 1] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/1id-abstracts.html The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html Copyright and License Notice Copyright (c) 2018 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. Requirements of Advanced Information Distribution . . . . . . . 4 4. Information Distribution in ANI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 5. Node Behaviors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 5.1 Instant Information Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5.1.1 Instant P2P and Flooding Communications . . . . . . . . 6 5.1.2 Instant Selective Flooding Communication . . . . . . . . 6 5.2 Asynchronous Information Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5.2.1 Information Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5.2.2 Event Queue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.2.3 Interface between IS and EQ Modules . . . . . . . . . . 10 5.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 6. Protocol Specification (GRASP extension) . . . . . . . . . . . 10 6.1 Un-solicited Synchronization Message (A new GRASP Message) . 11 6.2 Selective Flooding Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 6.3 Subscription Objective Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 6.4 Un_Subscription Objective Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 2] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 6.5 Publishing Objective Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 9.1 Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 9.2 Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Appendix A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1 Introduction In an autonomic network, autonomic functions (AFs) running on autonomic nodes would exchange information constantly, both for controlling/management signaling and data exchange. This document discusses the information distribution capability of such exchange between AFs. Scenarios of information distribution could be categorized into the following two basic models: 1) Point-to-point (P2P) Communication: information are exchanged between two communicating parties from one node to another node. 2) One-to-Many Communication: some information exchanges involve an information source and multiple receivers. The distribution approaches could also be categorized into two basic models: 1) An instant communication: a sender connects and sends the information data (e.g. control/management signaling, synchronization data and so on) to the receiver(s) immediately. 2) An asynchronous communication: a sender saves the information in the network, may or may not publish the information to the other who is interested in the published information, to which a node asks to retrieve. The Autonomic Network Infrastructure (ANI) [I-D.ietf-anima-reference- model] should have provided a generic way to support these various scenarios, rather than assisted by other transport or routing protocols (HTTP, BGP/IGP as bearing protocols etc.). In fact, GRASP already provides part of the capabilities. In this document, we first analyze requirements of information distribution in autonomic networks (Section 3), and then introduce Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 3] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 its relationship to the other modules in ANI (Section 4). After that, the node behaviors and extensions to the existing GRASP are introduced in Section 5 and Section 6, respectively. 2. Terminology The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119]. 3. Requirements of Advanced Information Distribution If the information that will be exchanged is simple and short, this can be done instantly. In practice, however, this is not always the case. In the following cases, a mixture of instant and asynchronous communication models is more appropriate. 1) Long Communication Intervals. The time interval of the communication is not necessarily always short and instant. Advanced AFs may rather involve heavy jobs/tasks (e.g. database lookup, authentication etc.) when gearing the network, so the instant mode may introduce unnecessary pending time and become less efficient. If simply using an instant mode, the AF has to wait until the tasks finish and return. A better way is that an AF instantly sends the request but switches to an synchronous mode, once the jobs are finished, AFs will get notified. 2) Common Interest Distribution. As mentioned, some information are common interests among AFs. For example, the network intent is distributed to network nodes enrolled, which is a typical one-to- many scenario. We can also finish the intent distribution by an instant flooding (e.g. via GRASP) to every network nodes across the network domain. Because of network dynamic, however, not every node can be just ready at the moment when the network intent is flooded. Actually, nodes may join in the network sequentially. In this situation, an asynchronous communication model could be a better choice where every (newly joining) node can subscribe the intent information and will get notified if it is ready (or updated). 3) Distributed Coordination. With computing and storage resources on autonomic nodes, alive AFs not only consumes but also generates data information. For example, AFs coordinating with each other as distributed schedulers, responding to service requests and distributing tasks. It is critical for those AFs to make correct decisions based on local information, which might be asymmetric as well. AFs may also need synthetic/aggregated data information (e.g. statistic info, like average values of several AFs, etc.) to Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 4] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 make decisions. In these situations, AFs will need an efficient way to form a global view of the network (e.g. about resource consumption, bandwidth and statistics). Obviously, purely relying on instant communication model is inefficient, while a scalable, common, yet distributed data layer, on which AFs can store and share information in an asynchronous way, should be a better choice. For ANI, in order to support various communication scenarios, an information distribution module is required, and both instant and asynchronous communication models should be supported. 4. Information Distribution in ANI This section describes how the information distribution module fits into the ANI of ANIMA, as well as what extensions are proposed against GRASP. +-------------------+ | ASAs + +-------------------+ ^ | v +-------------------------Info-Dist. APIs-----------------------+ | +---------------+ +-------------------+ +---------------+ | | | Event Queue |-|-| Selective Flooding|-|-| Info. Storage | | | +---------------+ +-------------------+ +---------------+ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ ^ | v +-------------GRASP APIs----------------+ | +---------------+ +---------------+ | | | GRASP Base |-|-| Extension | | | | +---------------+ +---------------+ | +---------------------------------------+ Figure 1. Information Distribution Module and GRASP Extension. As the Fig 1 shows, the information distribution module includes three sub-modules, all of which provides APIs for ASAs. Specific behaviors of these modules is described in Section 5. In order to support the modules, the GRASP is also extended, which is described in Section 6. 5. Node Behaviors Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 5] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 In this section, we discuss how each autonomic node should behave in order to realize the information distribution module. In other words, we discuss the node requirement if an information distribution module is required across the ANI. Supporting the two communication models that may happen in the ANI necessarily involves node interactions and information data exchange. Specifically, we first introduce the node requirement for the instant communication model, and after that we introduce the node requirement for the asynchronous communication model. 5.1 Instant Information Distribution In this case, sender(s) and receiver(s) are explicitly and immediately specified (e.g. the addresses of the receivers). Information will be directly sent from the sender(s) to the receiver(s). This requires that every node is equipped by some signaling/transport protocols so that they can coordinate with each other and correctly deliver the information. 5.1.1 Instant P2P and Flooding Communications We consider that current GRASP already provides some of the instant P2P and flooding communications capabilities. Straightforwardly, it is natural to use the GRASP Synchronization message directly for P2P distribution. Furthermore, it is also natural to use the GRASP Flood Synchronization message for 1-to-all distribution. However, as mentioned in Section 3, in some scenarios one node needs to actively send some information to another. GRASP Synchronization just lacks such capability. An un-solicited synchronization mechanism is needed. A relevant GRASP extension is defined in Section 6. 5.1.2 Instant Selective Flooding Communication When doing selective flooding, the distributed information needs to contain the criteria for nodes to judge which interfaces should be sent the distributed information and which are not. Specifically, the criteria contain: o Matching condition: a set of matching rules. o Matching object: the object that the match condition would be applied to. For example, the matching object could be node itself or its neighbors. o Action: what behavior the node needs to do when the matching Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 6] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 object matches or failed the matching condition. For example, the action could be forwarding or discarding the distributed message. The sender has to includes the criteria information in the message that carries the distributed information. The receiving node decides the action according to the criteria carried in the message. Still considering the criteria attached with the distributed information, the node behaviors can be: o When the Matching Object is "Neighbors", then the node matches the relevant information of its neighbors to the Matching Condition. If the node finds one neighbor matches the Matching Condition, then it forwards the distributed message to the neighbor. If not, the node discards forwarding the message to the neighbor. o When the Matching Object is the node itself, then the node matches the relevant information of its own to the Matching Condition. If the node finds itself matches the Matching Condition, then it forwards the distributed message to its neighbors; if not, the node discards forwarding the message to the neighbors. An example of selective flooding is briefly described in the Appendix A. 5.2 Asynchronous Information Distribution Asynchronous information distribution happens in a different way where sender(s) and receiver(s) are normally not immediately specified. In other words, both the sender and the receiver may come up in an asynchronous way. First of all, this requires that the information can be stored; secondly, it requires an information publication and subscription (Pub/Sub) mechanism. (Corresponding protocol specification of Pub/Sub is defined in Section 6.) As we sketched in the previous section, in general, each node requires two modules: 1) Information Storage (IS) module and 2) Event Queue (EQ) module. 1. These two modules should be integrated with the information distribution module. We introduce details of the two modules in the following sections. 5.2.1 Information Storage IS module handles how to save and retrieve information for ASAs across the network. The IS module uses a syntax to index information, not only generating the hash index value (e.g. a key) for the Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 7] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 information, but also mapping the hash index to a certain ANIMA node in ANI. Note that, this mechanism can use existing solutions. Specifically, storing information in an ANIMA network will be realized in the following steps. 1) ASA-to-IS Negotiation. An ASA calls the API provided by information distribution module (directly supported by IS sub- module) to request to store the information somewhere in the network. Such a request will be checked by the IS module who will response the request from the ASA whether such a request is feasible according to criteria such as permitted information size. 2) Destination Node Mapping. The information block will be handled by the IS module in order to calculate/map to a destination node in the network. Since ANIMA network is a peer-to-peer network, a typical way is to use dynamic hash table (DHT) to map information to a unique index identifier. For example, if the size of the information is reasonable, the information block itself can be hashed, otherwise, some meta-data of the information block can be used to generate the mapping. 3) Destination Node Negotiation Request. Negotiation request of storing the information will be sent from the IS module to the IS module on the destination node. The negotiation request contains parameters about the information block from the source IS module. According to the parameters as well as the local available resource, the destination node will feedback the source IS module. 4) Destination Node Negotiation Response. Negotiation response from the destination node is sent back to the source IS module. If the source IS module gets confirmation that the information can be stored, source IS module will prepare to transfer the information block; otherwise, a new destination node must be discovered (i.e. going to step 7). 5) Information Block Transfer. Before sending the information block to the destination node that accepts the request, the IS module of the source node will check if the information block can be afforded by one GRASP message. If so, the information block will be directly sent by calling a GRASP API. Otherwise, bulk data transmission with GRASP will be triggered, where multi-time GRASP message sending will be used so that one information block will be transferred by smaller pieces [I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model]. 6) Information Writing. Once the information block (or a smaller block) is received, the IS module of the destination node will store the data block in the local storage, which is accessible. Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 8] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 7) (Optional) New Destination Node Discovery. If the previously selected destination node is not available to store the information block, the source IS module will have to identify a new destination node to start a new negotiation. In this case, the discovery can be done by using discovery GRASP API to identify a new candidate, or more complex mechanisms can be introduced. Similarly, Getting information from an ANIMA network will be realized in the following steps. 1) ASA-to-IS Request. An ASA accesses the IS module via the APIs exposed by the information distribution module. The key/index of the interested information will be sent to the IS module. An assumption here is that the key/index should be ready to an ASA before an ASA can ask for the information. This relates to the publishing/subscribing of the information, which are handled by other modules (e.g. Event Queue with Pub/Sub supported by GRASP). 2) Destination Node Mapping. IS module maps the key/index of the requested information to a destination node, and prepares to start to request the information. The mapping here follows the same mechanism when the information is stored. 3) Retrieval Negotiation Request. The source IS module sends a request to the destination node identified in the previous step and asks if such an information object is available. 4) Retrieval Negotiation Response. The destination node checks the key/index of the requested information, and replies to the source IS module. If the information is found and the information block can be afforded within one GRASP message, the information will be sent together with the response to the source IS module. 5) (Optional) New Destination Request. If the information is not found after the source IS module gets the response from the original destination node, the source IS module will have to discover where the location storing the requested information is. IS module can reuse distributed databases and key value stores like NoSQL, Cassandra, DHT technologies. storage and retrieval of information are all event-driven responsible by the EQ module. 5.2.2 Event Queue Event Queue (EQ) module is responsible for event classification, event prioritization and event matching. Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 9] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 Firstly, EQ module provides isolated event queues customized for different event groups. Specifically, two groups of AFs could have completely different purposes or interests, therefore EQ classification allows to create multiple message queues where only AFs interested in the same category of events will be aware of the corresponding event queue. Secondly, events generated may have to be processed with different priorities. Some of them are more urgent than the normal and regular ones. Also between two event queues, their priorities may be different. EQ prioritization allows AFs to set different priorities on the information they published. Based on the priority settings in the event queue, matching and delivery of them will be adjusted. EQ module can provide several pre-defined priority levels for both intra-queue and inter-queue prioritizations. Third, events in queues will be listened and if a publishing event is found and matched by a registration event, information retrieval will be triggered. 5.2.3 Interface between IS and EQ Modules EQ and IS modules are correlated. When an AF publishes information, not only an publishing event is translated and sent to EQ module, but also the information is indexed and stored simultaneously. Similarly, when an AF subscribes information, not only subscribing event is triggered and sent to EQ module, but also the information will be retrieved by IS module at the same time. 5.3 Summary In summary, the general requirements for the information distribution module on each autonomic node are two sub-modules handling instant communications and asynchronous communications, respectively. For instant communications, node requirements are simple, in which signaling protocols have to be supported. With minimum efforts, reusing the existing GRASP is possible. For asynchronous communications, information distribution module requires event queue and information storage mechanism to be supported. 6. Protocol Specification (GRASP extension) There are multiple ways to integrate the information distribution module. The principle we follow is to minimize modifications made to the current ANI. We consider to use GRASP as an interface to access the information Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 10] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 distribution module. The main reason is that the current version of GRASP is already an information distribution module for the cases of P2P and flooding. In the following discussions, we introduce how to complete the missing part. 6.1 Un-solicited Synchronization Message (A new GRASP Message) In fragmentary CDDL, a Un-solicited Synchronization message follows the pattern: unsolicited_synch-message = [M_UNSOLDSYNCH, session-id, objective] A node MAY actively send a unicast Un-solicited Synchronization message with the Synchronization data, to another node. This MAY be sent to port GRASP_LISTEN_PORT at the destination address, which might be obtained by GRASP Discovery or other possible ways. The synchronization data are in the form of GRASP Option(s) for specific synchronization objective(s). 6.2 Selective Flooding Option In fragmentary CDDL, the selective flood follows the pattern: selective-flood-option = [O_SELECTIVE_FLOOD, +O_MATCH-CONDITION, match-object, action] O_MATCH-CONDITION = [O_MATCH-CONDITION, Obj1, match-rule, Obj2] Obj1 = text match-rule = GREATER / LESS / WITHIN / CONTAIN Obj2 = text match-object = NEIGHBOR / SELF action = FORWARD / DROP The selective flood option encapsulates a match-condition option which represents the conditions regarding to continue or discontinue flood the current message. For the match-condition option, the Obj1 and Obj2 are to objects that need to be compared. For example, the Obj1 could be the role of the device and Obj2 could be "RSG". The match rules between the two objects could be greater, less than, within, or contain. The match-object represents of which Obj1 belongs to, it could be the device itself or the neighbor(s) intended to be flooded. The action means, when the match rule applies, the current device just continues flood or discontinues. 6.3 Subscription Objective Option In fragmentary CDDL, a Subscription Objective Option follows the pattern: Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 11] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 subscription-objection-option = [SUBSCRIPTION, 2, 2, subobj] objective-name = SUBSCRIPTION objective-flags = 2 loop-count = 2 subobj = text This option MAY be included in GRASP M_Synchronization, when included, it means this message is for a subscription to a specific object. 6.4 Un_Subscription Objective Option In fragmentary CDDL, a Un_Subscribe Objective Option follows the pattern: Unsubscribe-objection-option = [UNSUBSCRIB, 2, 2, unsubobj] objective-name = SUBSCRIPTION objective-flags = 2 loop-count = 2 unsubobj = text This option MAY be included in GRASP M_Synchronization, when included, it means this message is for a un-subscription to a specific object. 6.5 Publishing Objective Option In fragmentary CDDL, a Publish Objective Option follows the pattern: publish-objection-option = [PUBLISH, 2, 2, pubobj] objective-name = PUBLISH objective-flags = 2 loop-count = 2 pubobj = text This option MAY be included in GRASP M_Synchronization, when included, it means this message is for a publish of a specific object data. Note that extended GRASP messages with new arguments inside here will trigger interactions/actions of the underlying information distribution module introduced in Section 5. Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 12] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 7. Security Considerations The distribution source authentication could be done at multiple layers: o Outer layer authentication: the GRASP communication is within ACP (Autonomic Control Plane, [I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane]). This is the default GRASP behavior. o Inner layer authentication: the GRASP communication might not be within a protected channel, then there should be embedded protection in distribution information itself. Public key infrastructure might be involved in this case. 8. IANA Considerations TBD. 9. References 9.1 Normative References [I-D.ietf-anima-grasp] Bormann, D., Carpenter, B., and B. Liu, "A Generic Autonomic Signaling Protocol (GRASP)", draft-ietf- animagrasp-15 (Standard Track), October 2017. 9.2 Informative References [RFC7575] Behringer, M., "Autonomic Networking: Definitions and Design Goals", RFC 7575, June 2015 [I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane] Eckert, T., Behringer, M., and S. Bjarnason, "An Autonomic Control Plane (ACP)", draft-behringer-anima-autonomic- control-plane-13, December 2017. [I-D.ietf-anima-stable-connectivity-10] Eckert, T., Behringer, M., "Using Autonomic Control Plane for Stable Connectivity of Network OAM", draft-ietf-anima- stable-connectivity-10, February 2018. [I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model] Behringer, M., Carpenter, B., Eckert, T., Ciavaglia, L., Pierre P., Liu, B., Nobre, J., and J. Strassner, "A Reference Model for Autonomic Networking", draft-ietf- Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 13] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 anima-reference-model-05, October 2017. [I-D.du-anima-an-intent] Du, Z., Jiang, S., Nobre, J., Ciavaglia, L., and M. Behringer, "ANIMA Intent Policy and Format", draft- duanima-an-intent-05 (work in progress), February 2017. [I-D.ietf-anima-grasp-api] Carpenter, B., Liu, B., Wang, W., and X. Gong, "Generic Autonomic Signaling Protocol Application Program Interface (GRASP API)", draft-ietf-anima-grasp-api-00 (work in progress), December 2017. [I-D.carpenter-anima-grasp-bulk-02] Carpenter, B., Jiang, S., Liu, B., "Transferring Bulk Data over the GeneRic Autonomic Signaling Protocol (GRASP)", draft-carpenter-anima-grasp-bulk-02 (work in progress), June 30, 2018 [3GPP.29.500] 3GPP, "Technical Realization of Service Based Architecture", 3GPP TS 29.500 15.1.0, 09 2018 [3GPP.23.501] 3GPP, "System Architecture for the 5G System", 3GPP TS 23.501 15.2.0, 6 2018, . [3GPP.23.502] 3GPP, "Procedures for the 5G System", 3GPP TS 23.502 15.2.0, 6 2018, . [5GAA.use.cases] White Paper "Toward fully connected vehicles: Edge computing for advanced automotive communications", 5GAA Appendix A. GRASP includes flooding criteria together with the delivered information so that every node will process and act according to the criteria specified in the message. An example of extending GRASP with Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 14] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 selective criteria can be: o Matching condition: "Device role=IPRAN_RSG" o Matching objective: "Neighbors" o Action: "Forward" This example means: only distributing the information to the neighbors who are IPRAN_RSG. Authors' Addresses Bing Liu Huawei Technologies Q27, Huawei Campus No.156 Beiqing Road Hai-Dian District, Beijing 100095 P.R. China Email: leo.liubing@huawei.com Sheng Jiang Huawei Technologies Q27, Huawei Campus No.156 Beiqing Road Hai-Dian District, Beijing 100095 P.R. China Email: jiangsheng@huawei.com Xun Xiao Munich Research Center Huawei technologies Riesstr. 25, 80992, Muenchen, Germany Emails: xun.xiao@huawei.com Artur Hecker Munich Research Center Huawei technologies Riesstr. 25, 80992, Muenchen, Germany Emails: artur.hecker@huawei.com Zoran Despotovic Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 15] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 Munich Research Center Huawei technologies Riesstr. 25, 80992, Muenchen, Germany Emails: zoran.despotovic@huawei.com Appendix A Real-world Use Cases of Information Distribution The requirement analysis in Section 3 shows that generally information distribution should be better of as an infrastructure layer module, which provides to upper layer utilizations. In this section, we review some use cases from the real-world where an information distribution module with powerful functions do plays a critical role there. A.1 Service-Based Architecture (SBA) in 3GPP 5G In addition to Internet, the telecommunication network (i.e. carrier mobile wireless networks) is another world-wide networking system. The architecture of the upcoming 5G mobile networks from 3GPP has already been defined to follow a service-based architecture (SBA) where any network function (NF) can be dynamically associated with any other NF(s) when needed to compose a network service. Note that one NF can simultaneously associate with multiple other NFs, instead of being physically wired as in the previous generations of mobile networks. NFs communicate with each other over service-based interface (SBI), which is also standardized by 3GPP [3GPP.23.501]. In order to realize an SBA network system, detailed requirements are further defined to specify how NFs should interact with each other with information exchange over the SBI. We now list three requirements that are related to information distribution here. 1) NF Pub/Sub: Any NF should be able to expose its service status to the network and any NF should be able to subscribe the service status of an NF and get notified if the status is available. An concrete example is that a session management function (SMF) can subscribe the REGISTER notification from an access management function (AMF) if there is a new user entity trying to access the mobile network [3GPP.23.502]. 2) Network Exposure Function (NEF): A particular network function that is required to manage the event exposure and distributions. In specific, SBA requires such a functionality to register network events from the other NFs (e.g. AMF, SMF and so on), classify the events and properly handle event distributions accordingly in Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 16] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 terms of different criteria (e.g. priorities) [3GPP.23.502]. 3) Network Repository Function (NRF): A particular network function where all service status information is stored for the whole network. An SBA network system requires all NFs to be stateless so as to improve the resilience as well as agility of providing network services. Therefore, the information of the available NFs and the service status generated by those NFs will be globally stored in NRF as a repository of the system. This clearly implies storage capability that keeps the information in the network and provides those information when needed. A concrete example is that whenever a new NF comes up, it first of all registers itself at NRF with its profile. When a network service requires a certain NF, it first inquires NRF to retrieve the availability information and decides whether or not there is an available NF or a new NF must be instantiated [3GPP.23.502]. (Note: 3GPP CT might finally adopt HTTP2.0/JSON to be the protocol communicating between NFs, but autonomic networks can also load HTTP2.0 with in ACP.) A.2 Vehicle-to-Everything Carrier networks On-boarding services of vertical industries are also one of some blooming topics that are heavily discussed. Connected car is clearly one of the important scenarios interested in automotive manufacturers, carriers and vendors. 5G Automotive Alliance - an industry collaboration organization defines many promising use cases where services from car industry should be supported by the 5G mobile network. Here we list two examples as follows [5GAA.use.cases]. 1) Software/Firmware Update: Car manufacturers expect that the software/firmware of their car products can be remotely updated/upgraded via 5G network in future, instead of onsite visiting their 4S stores/dealers offline as nowadays. This requires the network to provide a mechanism for vehicles to receive the latest software updates during a certain period of time. In order to run such a service for a car manufacturer, the network shall not be just like a network pipe anymore. Instead, information data have to be stored in the network, and delivered in a publishing/subscribing fashion. For example, the latest release of a software will be first distributed and stored at the access edges of the mobile network, after that, the updates can be pushed by the car manufacturer or pulled by the car owner as needed. 2) Real-time HD Maps: Autonomous driving clearly requires much finer details of road maps. Finer details not only include the Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 17] INTERNET DRAFT Information Distribution in ANI October 22, 2018 details of just static road and streets, but also real-time information on the road as well as the driving area for both local urgent situations and intelligent driving scheduling. This asks for situational awareness at critical road segments in cases of changing road conditions. Clearly, a huge amount of traffic data that are real-time collected will have to be stored and shared across the network. This clearly requires the storage capability, data synchronization and event notifications in urgent cases from the network, which are still missing at the infrastructure layer. A.3 Summary Through the general analysis and the concrete examples from the real- world, we realize that the ways information are exchanged in the coming new scenarios are not just short and instant anymore. More advanced as well as diverse information distribution capabilities are required and should be generically supported from the infrastructure layer. Upper layer applications (e.g. ASAs in ANIMA) access and utilize such a unified mechanism for their own services. Liu, et al. Expires April 25, 2019 [Page 18]