Paris, Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Orange and Inria are announcing the creation of the <I/O Lab> , a joint research laboratory to reinforce their cooperation in network functions virtualisation, the convergence of communication networks and cloud computing. Through this initiative, which is initially slated to last 5 years, both partners will be able to take advantage of the complementary expertise of the Orange Labs and Inria teams.

The creation of this laboratory, which will lead to technical and scientific animation, reflects our common desire for Open Source use of our research results, by disseminating them to the relevant communities, in which Inria and Orange already have experience.

For Inria, the creation of this joint laboratory will reinforce an already rich and fruitful cooperation with Orange Labs. The skills of Inria's researchers, especially concerning performance, failure resistance and network energy optimisation, will be a strategic asset when taking on the challenges of 5G. For Orange, the research partnership with Inria is part and parcel of its strategy to modernise its networks, moving towards network functions virtualisation, to serve its customers more quickly.

A technological and strategic challenge to transform the network and cloud infrastructures

The networks, now made up of dedicated equipment, will undergo a radical transformation in the next decade as a result of the progress of virtualisation techniques. General purpose servers will be able to use software to incorporate more and more network functions, all while meeting the networks' growing needs for capacity and reliability. At the same time, cloud computing techniques will contribute to the development of flexible storage and processing capacities in data centres and even within networks and their peripheries, including connected devices and objects ("fog/(mobile) edge computing"). This trend could be strengthened by the increased momentum of the Internet of Things and Big Data processing. A controlled deployment of these virtualisation and "cloudification" solutions for network functions twill provide the infrastructures with much more flexibility, allowing them to become truly open and agile innovation platforms to develop innovative services. The <I/O Lab>'s vision is to develop a coherent, flexible and reliable management structure for the networks of the future, seen as distributed communication, storage and processing infrastructures. This will be achieved by virtue of the dual distributed network and software culture of its partners and a large contribution of the worldwide Open Source communities.

An ambitious roadmap to prepare for the infrastructures of the future

The <I/O Lab> will promote the emergence of a "global operating system" ("GlobalOS") to operate this extensive and very distributed infrastructure that will support applications with extremely varied demands (security, performance, availability, cost, energy constraint, etc.). Orange and Inria's joint laboratory will work on the main obstacles currently standing in the way of the implementation of such a system in a network/cloud environment, but that will be available by 2020 to coincide with the deployment of 5G: GlobalOS architecture, traffic and execution models, dynamic resource allocation and investment, operating reliability and security, supervision and measurement systems, and more.

About Inria

Inria, the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics, promotes “scientific excellence for technology transfer and society”. Graduates of the world’s top universities, Inria's 2,700 employees rise to the challenges of digital sciences. With its open, agile model, Inria is able to explore original approaches with its partners in industry and academia and provide an efficient response to the multidisciplinary and application challenges of the digital transformation. Inria works closely with major innovators to create the conditions for beneficial exchanges between public research bodies, private R&D and companies. Inria transfers expertise and research results to companies (start-ups, SMEs and major groups) in fields as diverse as healthcare, transport, energy, communications, security and privacy protection, smart cities and the factory of the future. Inria also develops an entrepreneurial culture which has resulted in the creation of 120 start-ups.