In the old home gateway architecture, the OSGi deployed in the home gateway and act as the service platform. but when the virtual home gateway architecture is coming, the execution environment deployed in the virtual home gateway still is OSGi?
The question is quite interesting. I'll try to put my two cents in this discussion...
In a standalone RGW, OSGi provided a modular and somewhat containerized execution environment for services. But in a Virtual CPE, built accordingly with the ETSI vision, what you have is a bunch of VNFs that are put together with the help of a Service Function Chain to form a service instance. So, there are a lot of possibilities:
-VNF instances can be hosted on different Infrastructure Points of Presence
-you may have shared/consolidated VNFs, among several service instances
-you may have hybrid service chains that include Physical Network Functions
So, the question is: can we integrate OSGi in this ecosystem ? The execution environments for VNFs are not restricted and (I've seen everything, from unikernels or rumpkernels, to conventional VMs or even containers), so, at least theoretically, you may implement a VNF that is containerized within an OSGi EE - of course, there may be scalability or overhead issues that must be carefully managed but it is possible, nonetheless.
The question is: can we envision use cases that explicitly require OSGI-based VNFs in a VRGW SFC ? For me, this is a crucial point.
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