International Collaborators Use NIST Concepts and Expertise to Design Federated 5G Testbeds

International collaborators, including NIST, seeking to connect several 5G testbeds across the world, held a technical workshop at the University of Arizona in February 2023. The effort is called “Project Agility” and is pursuing testbeds that use 5G to access federated cloud computing, which ties together computing clouds in multiple sectors, to achieve faster and greater access to data from more sources.

The workshop builds on progress made in 2022 workshops held in Korea and at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD. The February 2023 workshop included participation by four NIST researchers. The workshop focused on designing a “network federation” across these testbeds – meaning a federation that intelligently configures a network for a requested service. This intelligent configuration will be enabled by artificial intelligence models in a knowledge plane, termed “Generic Autonomic Network Architecture (GANA),” across the network federation. NIST researchers will conduct a public working group to guide the development of this knowledge plane, or GANA.

International collaborators plan to provide cybersecurity for this knowledge plane, or GANA, using NIST’s “Zero Trust” principles for implementing an enterprise architecture, as described in NIST Special Publication 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture. Basically, Zero Trust means that every transaction on the network must be verified. It is a concept that is widely used beyond NIST.

International collaborators also planned the design of the “service federation” for these testbeds, which will enable the cloud federation to serve these testbeds. They will implement the service federation, in keeping with IEEE 2302-2021 Standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation. NIST researchers led the development of this standard, which is also based on Special Publication 500-332 The NIST Cloud Federation Reference Architecture.