Abstract
Network services underpin operator revenues, and value-added services provide income beyond core (voice and data) infrastructure capability. Today, operators face multiple challenges: a need to innovate and offer a wider choice of value-added services, whilst increasing network scale, bandwidth and flexibility. They must also reduce operational costs, and deploy services far faster - in minutes rather than days or weeks.In the recent years, the network community, motivated by the aforementioned challenges, has developed production network architectures and seeded technologies, like Software Defined Networking, Application-based Network Operations and Network Function Virtualization. These technologies enhance the highly desired properties for elasticity, agility and cost-effectiveness in the operator environment. A key requirement to fully exploit the benefits of these new architectures and technologies is a fundamental shift in management and control of resources, and the ability to orchestrate the network infrastructure: coordinate the instantiation of high-level network services across different technological domains and automate service deployment and re-optimization.This paper surveys existing standardization efforts for the orchestration - automation, coordination, and management - of complex set of network and function resources (both physical and virtual), and highlights the various enabling technologies, strengths and weaknesses, adoption challenges for operators, and areas where further research is required.
Highlights
Flexibility, agility and automation and a much faster time-to-market cycle, where the latter is something that we, as operators, lack today (Christos Kolias, Network Architect, Orange [1])Network services are the primary value-added products for Network Operators, enabling them to monetize their infrastructure investments
We identify the following functional properties: Coordination: Operator infrastructures comprise of a wide range of network and computation systems providing a diverse set of resources, including network bandwidth, CPU and storage
A key goal for operators is the development of new network service orchestration mechanisms which provide convergence between network technologies, automation in the deployment and management of network service and flexible and crosslayer resource control and provision
Summary
Flexibility, agility and automation and a much faster time-to-market cycle, where the latter is something that we, as operators, lack today (Christos Kolias, Network Architect, Orange [1]). The futuristic vision of network operators to provide service-oriented control interfaces to enduser applications, still remains unfulfilled These limitations have motivated the network and systems community to develop new paradigms and architectures which improve network infrastructure flexibility, agility, programmability and elasticity and ensure low OPEX. Gies and resource types available in modern network infrastructures These systems are responsible to converge control and management heterogeneity between technologies, in an effort to synthesize innovative service-oriented interfaces, and enable autonomous and automated service deployment and adaptation. Based on the received service requests, the available infrastructure resources and the topological properties of the underlying network, the orchestrator is responsible to define and execute a deployment plan that fulfills the NF and connectivity requirements of each service. The service orchestrator monitors the performance of all services and dynamically adjusts the infrastructure configuration to continuously ensure the performance guarantees and cost goals
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