MDS Global’s participation in a TM Forum network slicing catalyst

MDS Global participated in the 2020 Digital Transformation World catalyst project as part of the 5G Ride On! catalyst. The purpose of this catalyst was to demonstrate how a complex ecosystem of partners, systems and business processes, as found in the electric vehicle charging market, can be orchestrated and monetised by a virtualised 5G service provider using an autonomous network framework.

Our catalyst project won the TM Forum Catalyst Award for Outstanding Ecosystem Design.

Play Video

Catalyst Demo Video

This catalyst project:

  • Demonstrates how a telecom service provider can offer an assured service with improved SLAs that self-heals from network outage and assures service performance. This is a common community and enterprise IIoT need, prime for operationalisation and monetisation.
  • Employs the latest 3GPP, TMF and ETSI standards, including 5G network slicing, multi-access edge computing (MEC) and virtual network functions (VNFs) to achieve the desired result.
  • Creates an autonomous network orchestrated through a cognitive closed-loop process using TOSCA templates and VNFs that route traffic to a fail-over MEC.
  • Uses a TMF multi-vendor ODA-aligned architecture, covering fulfilment, assurance and billing eTOM processes, that serves ecosystem customers, suppliers and curators from order to production.

We also demonstrate how such a service should be monetised to deliver greater returns on 5G investment, and how the business curator plays a critical role in helping the service provider co-create the key elements of this dedicated 5G-assured service to meet market expectations and support its commercialisation, launch and marketing.

This industrial IoT use case involves multiple nuanced parties, stakeholders and network service needs, so we further emphasise simplicity in stakeholder on-boarding, transparency and control through a digital e-commerce platform. This role is played by MDS Global, with its enterprise BSS solution, B2BonDemand. Our sister company, Incognito, is responsible for orchestrating the fixed, mobile and app services, seamlessly integrating with MDS Global’s BSS system, and providing a platform for assured connectivity.

MDS Global is working alongside BT, Orange, TIM, Incognito, TEOCO and Huawei to deliver this project and contribute to TMF standards. The diagram opposite illustrates the multi-vendor architecture of this catalyst environment.

Enterprise configuration gif

B2BonDemand

B2BonDemand is a BSS platform for service providers offering enterprise services via direct (B2B) and indirect (B2B2X) business models. It offers best-practice enterprise processes and functionality to automate and digitise all touch points with SMEs, large corporates, resellers, public sectors and IoT partners. It provides an agile and co-creative environment to support go-to-market initiatives driven by business curators exploiting new virtualised infrastructure to provide fully nuanced market products.

Download the B2BonDemand Datasheet