Network data sharing: a governance framework for ensuring data sovereignty and privacy compliance

Abstract

The telecommunications industry is undergoing a paradigm shift toward open, disaggregated, and automated networks, necessitating a secure, regulated, and sovereign approach to telemetry data sharing among stakeholders. This paper introduces a pioneering governance framework that leverages the Eclipse Dataspace Components Connector to enforce policy-driven telemetry data exchange within the multi-stakeholder telco ecosystem. The proposed framework offers advanced anonymization mechanisms and dynamic policy-enforcement controls, including stakeholder-specific, time-based, and location-aware access restrictions, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. In this regard, we propose two novel, to our knowledge, data model vocabularies for modeling the telemetry data sharing problem according to the principles of the International Data Spaces Association, enabling seamless integration and valid application of data sovereignty principles. We experimentally validate the proposed framework through four use-cases designed based on real-world scenarios from operational settings, which address various stakeholder-specific data exchange scenarios, over the Fraunhofer HHI’s software-defined-networking-enabled photonics testbed. We present the policy enforcement capabilities of the framework through various experiments. Additionally, we report an in-depth performance analysis to reveal the latency and communication overhead of the proposed framework compared to conventional telemetry sharing solutions that do not comply with data sovereignty principles. The work in this paper demonstrates innovative contributions that enable data governance within optical networks, driving forward compliance, innovation, and stakeholder collaboration.