MeDICINE: Rapid Prototyping of Production-Ready Network Services in Multi-PoP Environments

Virtualized network services consisting of multiple individual network functions are already today deployed across multiple sites, so called multi-PoP (points of presence) environ- ments. This allows to improve service performance by optimizing its placement in the network. But prototyping and testing of these complex distributed software systems becomes extremely challenging. The reason is that not only the network service as such has to be tested but also its integration with management and orchestration systems. Existing solutions, like simulators, basic network emulators, or local cloud testbeds, do not support all aspects of these tasks. To this end, we introduce MeDICINE, a novel NFV prototyping platform that is able to execute production-ready network func- tions, provided as software containers, in an emulated multi-PoP environment. These network functions can be controlled by any third-party management and orchestration system that connects to our platform through standard interfaces. Based on this, a developer can use our platform to prototype and test complex network services in a realistic environment running on his laptop.Comment: 6 pages, pre-prin

Introducing Development Features for Virtualized Network Services

Network virtualization and softwarizing network functions are trends aiming at higher network efficiency, cost reduction and agility. They are driven by the evolution in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This shows that software will play an increasingly important role within telecommunication services, which were previously dominated by hardware appliances. Service providers can benefit from this, as it enables faster introduction of new telecom services, combined with an agile set of possibilities to optimize and fine-tune their operations. However, the provided telecom services can only evolve if the adequate software tools are available. In this article, we explain how the development, deployment and maintenance of such an SDN/NFV-based telecom service puts specific requirements on the platform providing it. A Software Development Kit (SDK) is introduced, allowing service providers to adequately design, test and evaluate services before they are deployed in production and also update them during their lifetime. This continuous cycle between development and operations, a concept known as DevOps, is a well known strategy in software development. To extend its context further to SDN/NFV-based services, the functionalities provided by traditional cloud platforms are not yet sufficient. By giving an overview of the currently available tools and their limitations, the gaps in DevOps for SDN/NFV services are highlighted. The benefit of such an SDK is illustrated by a secure content delivery network service (enhanced with deep packet inspection and elastic routing capabilities). With this use-case, the dynamics between developing and deploying a service are further illustrated