Cloud native Lightweight Slice Orchestration (CLiSO) framework

Abstract

Cloud-native network functions are becoming promising for 5G and beyond networks. They provide the much needed agility and flexibility that was missing from virtual machines. Though, this paradigm shift of using cloud-native application design principles, containerization, microservices, high resilience, and on-demand scaling has created challenges for legacy orchestration systems. They were designed for handling virtual machine-based network functions. Indeed, network slice orchestration requires interaction with multiple technological domain orchestrators, access, transport, core network, and edge computing. The specifications and existing orchestrators are made on top of the legacy virtual machine based network function orchestration. Hence, this limitation constrains their approach to managing a cloud-native network function. To overcome their challenges, we propose a novel Cloud-native Lightweight Slice Orchestration (CLiSO) framework extending our previously proposed Lightweight edge Slice Orchestration (LeSO) framework. In addition, we present a technology-agnostic and deployment-oriented network slice template. To allow zero-touch management of network slices, our framework provides a concept of Domain Specific Handlers. The framework has been thoroughly evaluated via orchestrating OpenAirInterface container network functions on public and private cloud platforms.