The Cloud Battle & Network Slicing

The Cloud Battle

Up until now, the European cloud marketplace has been dominated by US firms such as AWS or Microsoft Azure. Many in Brussels fear that this American involvement is compromising the concept of Europe’s digital sovereignty.

Issues
Relying of foreign companies to store the massive amount of data produced every day by Europe raises several issues. Is it safe to have sensible data managed by non-European private entities who are not entirely subject to EU laws? Furthermore, data is the raw material for numerous new technologies and research, not having control over it has significantly reduced the transition to a digital economy in Europe and slowed down technological innovation. Consequently, Europe appears “weak” comparison to the USA or China.

European Initiative
Since 2016, the European Union has showed its desire to create a European cloud infrastructure with the European Cloud Initiative. This initiative launched the European Open Science Cloud, a virtual environment, for Europe’s 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals, to store, share and re-use the large volumes of information generated by the big data revolution. This was supposed to be underpinned by a European Data Infrastructure.

Following this initiative, the Gaia-X project was initiated by France and Germany in 2019. A project by Europe, for Europe which aims for the development of an efficient and competitive, secure and trustworthy European data infrastructure. The implementation of Gaia-X is not intended to create a competing product to existing offers but to link existing cloud Services into a unified ecosystem. As well as making domestic cloud providers more visible, Gaia-X will make it easier for businesses across various industries — such as healthcare, agriculture, finance, energy and public services — to exchange data.

The Gaia-X platform should make its debut in 2021 and become a stepping stone for Europe to attain digital sovereignty.

Network Slicing

One of the key features introduced with 5G is network slicing. It is the use of network virtualization to divide single network connections into multiple distinct virtual connections. Each of these virtual connections is a slice dedicated to a certain type of applications and resources are allowed depending on the applications requirements.

Each slice can have its own architecture, management, and security to support a specific use case. While functional components and resources may be shared across network slices, capabilities such as data speed, capacity, connectivity, quality, latency, reliability, and services can be customized in each slice to conform to a specific Service Level Agreement.

There is a myriad of use cases for 5G network slicing falling into three major categories:

• Extreme (or enhanced) Mobile Broadband (eMBB): for video-centric applications that consume a lot of bandwith and will generate the most traffic on the mobile network. This is what consumers will care about
• Massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC): for Internet of Things devices. These devices require far less traffic than eMBB applications but there will be many magnitudes more of them
• Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications: for critical applications that have low-latency and high reliability, such as autonomous driving or robotic surgery. For these applications losing a data packet in transit or slow delivery of packets could be risky. The URLLC standard requires “sub-millisecond latency with error rates that are lower than 1 packet loss in ¹⁰⁵ packets”

Network slicing will provide an improved network robustness for consumers and businesses and important savings for Mobile Network Operators.