From a functional perspective the scope is limited to telco APIs, that means APIs in the domain of telco mobile networks, telco fixed line networks, telco edge cloud, etc. or supporting these (e.g. for authentication). CAMARA only works on customer-facing northbound APIs. East-west federation / roaming APIs are out of scope for CAMARA.

We differentiate between 3 types of Northbound APIs:

• Service APIs: APIs intended for end consumers and integrated by developers to invoke a certain telco capability.
• Service Management APIs: APIs intended for end consumers to manage or get data about offered Service APIs in application runtime, e.g., check service availability or performance information.
• Operate APIs: Operational and maintenance APIs provided by a telco to channel partners for the purpose of service fulfillment and assurance to their [channel partner] customers. This may include service provisioning for a mobile user, technical API performance monitoring, fault ticketing, information exchange such as product catalog, pricing, settlement, etc.

In the following picture you can find an illustration of these 3 types of APIs. Service APIs and Service Management APIs are in scope of CAMARA (and both will be referred to in the following as CAMARA APIs), Operate APIs are out of scope of CAMARA (these are already covered by other SDOs = Standards Development Organizations like TM Forum).

Figure 1 – Interface types in NaaS

Service APIs and Service Management APIs mean an abstraction / aggregation of e.g. 3GPP APIs, Broadband Forum APIs or ETSI MEC APIs to hide telco complexity, keep control at the operator side and fulfill regulatory and data privacy constraints.

Figure 2 – The transformation function translates exposed service APIs into call flows that invoke internal telco capabilities

The way how the different API types shall be consumed is shown in the figure below.

Figure 3 – Typical consumers / producers of each API types

The following picture shows how the different API standards complement each other.

Figure 4 – Different entities participating in the NaaS service standardization

The service scope of the CAMARA Project is limited to the following activities:

• Collect API requirements from GSMA OPG (Operator Platform Group, a GSMA group that defines the reference architecture and requirements of the platform the operators use to expose their capabilities to Customers via APIs) and other sources. That can be a (prioritized) list of API families seen as useful for the customers, a functional description of the APIs (attributes, function, result), and also non-functional requirements for the APIs (response time, scalability, performance, etc.). All APIs developed within GSMA/OPG and contributed to the CAMARA Project will be developed under Apache-2.0.
• Define Service APIs and Service Management APIs (e.g. by Swagger) and create test plan / cases and tools from a business and API consumer perspective
• Develop Service APIs and Service Management APIs (and reference implementation for transformation functions)
• Create test cases and perform verifications and tests from developer perspective (to show that the Service APIs, the and Service Management APIs and the transformation functions have been developed correctly)
• Create developer friendly documentation for Service APIs and Service Management APIs
• Test Service APIs and Service Management APIs from business and customer perspective (validation) in telco network(s)
• Create deployment packages for Service APIs and Service Management APIs
• Create a reference architecture for Service APIs and Service Management APIs (if possible preferred solution is to refer to an existing architecture)
• Define a standard API lifecycle, development and test process including tools for the project