Standardization activities aim to look into relevant tasks that ACCORDION can benefit from, and if possible, contribute to. Spotting the standards that would help tackle the challenges that the project faces and adopting them is the minimum expectation, however, ACCORDION went ahead and made some contributions of its own to ITU-T standards, through the work of ACCORDION partner TUB.
Several activity opportunities by standardization committees or communities were explored and analyzed, and a decision was made on whether it is appropriate to monitor, contribute to, or drop the respective standards. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 is a standardization committee that is focused on information security, cybersecurity, and privacy protection. It includes a huge (over 200) number of items and standards that often cannot be associated with the research work of ACCORDION.
This, along with the fact that access to the majority of the standard documents is not free to encourage further analysis, as well as the difficulty in contributing to it, led to this option being dropped. The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is setting standards regarding architectures, specifications, roadmaps, and glossaries for distributed computing software. The reason this standardization activity was dropped was that the OGF standards that had some relevance to ACCORDION were deemed outdated and replaced with already existing technologies, such as modern container-level orchestrators, whereas the more recent activities of this forum are not directly linked to the project activities.
ITU-T SG13 refers to a specification focusing on next-generation networks. It describes details and architectures of the cloud computing ecosystem, covering
inter- and intra-cloud computing and technologies supporting “X-as-a-Service”, as well as Cloud Computing in support of the Internet of Things (IoT). Furthermore, the group studies network aspects of mobile telecommunications, and because of the analogy that can be drawn between the inter-cloud relationships and the functionality that one provides to another, and the mini cloud federation concept proposed by ACCORDION, this specification is being monitored to adapt as many of its elements in the project as possible.
ETSI Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) offers cloud-computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the network.
Its characteristics of ultra-low latency and high bandwidth suit ACCORDION application needs. MEC is dependent on ETSI ISG NFV, which specializes in requirements and architecture for virtualizing functions in telecom networks. It defines management functions of virtualized resources, which dictate the lifecycle of the VNF by including operations such as Instantiation, Scaling, or Termination of a VNF. This work is monitored by ACCORDION since it is relevant to the work done on the network orchestrator by AALTO.
Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation Research Group is a new group within SPEC, researching quantitative system evaluation and analysis. It emphasizes on computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental analysis, including performance metrics such as response time, throughput, or non-functional system properties, like availability and reliability. It aims to design metrics for system evaluation, as well as methodologies and tools for measurement, load testing, etc. ACCORDION’s involvement in SPEC RG activities, through the work of HUA, was expressed in the identification of the distinguishing characteristics of cloud/edge orchestrators. This resulted in the contribution of the knowledge of KubeEdge and K3S orchestrators, and the design of a set of benchmarking experiments.
ITU-T Study Group 12 is highly relevant to ACCORDION when it comes to Quality of Experience (QoE) modeling. Although it covers the full spectrum of terminals, networks, and services, ranging from speech over fixed circuit-switched networks to multimedia applications over mobile and packet-based networks, there was little information concerning the factors that affect the Quality of Experience of online video games, subjective methods for assessing gaming QoE, or prediction models to plan and manage QoE during service set-up and operation. The inherent differences between evaluating gaming applications and task-oriented human-machine interactions signalize the need for a set of standards to be established so that collaborative work through comparative research can be facilitated.
TUB led the work items P.GAME, G.QoE-gaming, and G.OMG that were recommended by ITU-T SG12 during the 2013-2016 Study Period. TUB also published in April 2021 a QoE column at ACM Sigmm records with those recommendations, alongside some ongoing or newly established evaluation methods and gaming QoE modeling activities, including G.OMMOG (Opinion Model for Mobile Online Gaming Applications), which is directly related to the use case #2. Following up, a paper called “Modeling and Understanding the Quality of Experience of Online Mobile Gaming Services” was also submitted at the 13th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience, and a total of 5 contributions were made in the ITU-T SG12 meeting from 4-13 May 2021 at which the topic of VR/AR multimedia services linked to the ACCORDION use cases #1 and #3 was targeted.