Network Service Orchestration: A survey Saraiva de Sousa, Nathan F.; Lachos Perez, Danny A.; Rosa, Raphael V. ...
Computer communications,
06/2019, Volume:
142-143
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Business models of network service providers are undergoing an evolving transformation fueled by vertical customer demands and technological advances such as 5G, Software Defined Networking (SDN), ...and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Emerging scenarios call for agile network services consuming network, storage, and compute resources across heterogeneous infrastructures and administrative domains. Coordinating resource control and service creation across interconnected domains and diverse technologies becomes a grand challenge. Research and development efforts are being devoted to enabling orchestration processes to automate, coordinate, and manage the deployment and operation of network services. In this survey, we delve into the topic of Network Service Orchestration (NSO) by reviewing the historical background, relevant research projects, enabling technologies, and standardization activities. We define key concepts and propose a taxonomy of NSO approaches and solutions to pave the way towards a common understanding of the various ongoing efforts around the realization of diverse NSO application scenarios. Based on the analysis of the state of affairs, we present a series of open challenges and research opportunities, altogether contributing to a timely and comprehensive survey on the vibrant and strategic topic of network service orchestration.
5G networks envisage to support a range of vertical industries, circumventing any potential barriers from converging various network technologies and administrative domains. Current solutions focus ...only on provisioning services within single administrative domains. There is also lack of standards for sustainable end-to-end multi-domain solutions that can use existing Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Management and Orchestration (MANO) systems. This is important to enable operators to collaborate and create innovative end-to-end services in a sustainable environment, where stakeholders can benefit without compromises. In this article, we present the 5GUK Exchange (5GUKEx), a novel hierarchical architecture to enable end-to-end orchestration with minimum overhead in complexity and performance while also allowing operators to maintain full control of their infrastructure. 5GUKEx allows operators to use their existing MANO systems for the single domain orchestration and build a multi-domain API based on standardized models exposed by service catalogues to coordinate the end-to-end service orchestration and interconnection. We built a prototype of the 5GUKEx and evaluated its performance through emulations showing that the 5GUKEx introduces minimum overhead. We also discuss the use-cases and trials using 5GUKEx in addition to the experiments focusing on the flexible nature of architecture, allowing us to use 5GUKEx to provide connectivity among multi domains over optical transport network.
Network service orchestration across heterogeneous networks needs an open marketplace where the services advertised by the providers in different domains can be purchased for short-term or long-term ...time scales. The authors present two design paradigms and evaluate two corresponding prototypes which provide a framework for network services to be purchased. They compare the two prototypes from the point of view of how effective they are in addressing some of the challenges posed by heterogeneous 5G networks namely programmability, scalability and innovation. They present a network service orchestration algorithm which is advertised as a network service in the marketplace.
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