978-1-6654-4005-9/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE From Cloud-Native to 5G-Ready Vertical Applications: An Industry 4.0 Use Case Raffaele Bolla DITEN, University of Genoa, Italy Franco Davoli DITEN, University of Genoa, Italy S2N National Lab., CNIT, Italy Chiara Lombardo S2N National Lab., CNIT, Italy Roberto Bruschi DITEN, University of Genoa, Italy Zied Ghrairi BIBA, Bremen, Germany Jane Frances Pajo Telenor Research, Norway Kay Burow BIBA, Bremen, Germany Panagiotis Gouvas UBITECH, Greece Anastasios Zafeiropoulos National Technical University of Athens, Greece Abstract—This paper aims to showcase the ability of the MATILDA Platform to enable vertical applications fully utilizing the capabilities offered by the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G). Although 5G, powered by network slicing and edge computing, promises to flexibly support radically new and extremely heterogeneous vertical applications, vertical stakeholders generally lack both the skills to exploit the full potentials of 5G networks and the vision of the underlying resources, owned by Telecom providers that are reluctant to expose them in an unmediated way. The MATILDA platform bridges the gap between the vertical application and the network service domains. This paper presents the case of an Industry 4.0 application, and highlights the role played by the MATILDA solution in its successful deployment and orchestration. Keywords—5G, slicing, Industry 4.0 I. INTRODUCTION The advent of the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) is predicted as a leading factor in the digital transformation by Big Data and Cloud Computing technologies towards a new hyper-connected society. 5G has been designed to provide flexible support for radically new and extremely heterogeneous vertical applications, requiring any custom mix of network and radio services. In particular, applications under the Industry 4.0 umbrella, with their zero-perceived latency requirements, would strongly benefit from the 5G widespread diffusion. As market trends show, the demands for new services and new technical solutions coming from stakeholders and customers postulate the industrial sector, which has to react on these demands and further develop the existing manufacturing towards a higher level of flexibility, efficiency and “servitization”: on one side, to provide the requested high level of servitization up to services as a service (SaaS), on the other side, to further integrate and adapt highly automated manufacturing systems, which are running on technical and physical limits. Especially the latter show the need for new solutions and approaches [1]. In this context, 5G network slicing [2] and edge computing [3] can provide the required connectivity features by hosting vertical applications onto the 5G infrastructure, and directly attaching them to the network slice terminations in neighboring geographical facilities. Network slices can be customized to perfectly match the desired network and radio services features and constraints of vertical industries to interconnect their devices and terminals and directly manage them. However, vertical stakeholders generally lack the basic knowledge to exploit the full potentials of 5G networks. Moreover, the Telecom providers owning the physical infrastructure are less than prone to allow third parties independently orchestrating their resources. In such context, the necessary integration between the digital systems that enable vertical services and the network layer remains undefined and represents a big challenge. In this scenario, the main aim of the MATILDA H2020 European Project [4] has been to bridge the gap between the vertical application and the network service domains with a platform able to i) transform a cloud-native application into a 5G-ready one, ii) providing the vertical stakeholders with a complete 5G network slice, from the radio access to the core, and iii) allowing them to manage the lifecycle of their applications, regardless of the underneath infrastructure, all in a Zero-touch network and Service Management (ZSM) fashion [5]. MATILDA provides verticals with a familiar, cloud-style interface in which, by simply adding their application graph and constraints, they can obtain a 5G-ready application instantiated over a wide-area infrastructure that they can orchestrate in a secure and isolated fashion. In order to assess how MATILDA is suited to enable vertical applications fully utilizing the capabilities offered by 5G, this paper presents one of the demonstrators developed within the project and presented during the Project’s final demonstration in October 2020, showcasing an Industry 4.0 application, and highlights the role played by the MATILDA solution in proving the application successful. The paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the MATILDA platform, while the Industry 4.0 use case can be found in Section III and the conclusions are drawn in Section IV. II. THE MATILDA VISION AND SOLUTION MATILDA comes up with a novel and holistic approach for tackling the overall lifecycle of applications’ design, development, deployment and orchestration in a 5G environment. A set of novel concepts have been introduced, including the design and development of 5G-ready applications – based on cloud-native/microservice development principles [6], the separation of concerns among the orchestration of the developed applications and the required network services that support them, as well as the specification and management of network slices that are 2021 IEEE 22nd International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR) | 978-1-6654-4005-9/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/HPSR52026.2021.9481826