Network Orchestration in Reliable 5G/NFV/SDN Infrastructures

In this paper, we elaborate an SDN orchestration solution aiming at the dynamic adaptation of service chain paths thereby addressing high-availability requirements of 5G applications. We present an SDN orchestrator that periodically monitors the availability of the network and, if necessary, promptly adapts service chain paths to recover from congestion events and to preserve network QoS performance of service data flows. A set of performance results are finally presented.This work has been partially supported by the EU H2020 5G Exchange (5GEx) innovation project (grant no. 671636) and by EU H2020 5G-Transformer Project (grant no. 761536

A Model-Based Abstraction Layer for Heterogeneous SDN Applications

Modern controllers for software-defined networks (SDN) enable the execution of arbitrary SDN applications (eg, Network Address Translation (NAT), traffic monitors) that may be exploited by an overarching set of services (eg, application-layer orchestrators) to build even richer services. To this purpose, the above overarching services require a mechanism that allows reading the run-time state and writing the configuration of arbitrary SDN applications, possibly through a uniform API. Unfortunately, most SDN applications are not designed/implemented by taking into account the possibility to be used as part of higher level service workflows (eg, a complex intrusion prevention system that leverages multiple elementary services as individual components), hence they may not provide an adequate interface that would allow overarching services to exploit their features. This paper addresses this problem by proposing an approach to represent the run-time state of arbitrary applications, where data are exported according to high-level model-based structures. Furthermore, the mapping from the high-level data model to the actual data representation within the SDN application is enabled by a suite of algorithms that are generic enough to operate independently of the actual source code of the application, thus avoiding undesired and invasive modifications to existing applications. The paper also presents a software framework and a prototype implementing the proposed approach, characterizes the resulting performance, and discusses pros and cons of the proposed approach

Slice Isolation for 5G Transport Networks

Network slicing plays a key role in the 5G ecosystem for vertical industries to introduce new services. However, one widely-recognized challenge of network slicing is to provide traffic isolation and concurrently satisfy diverse performance requirements, e.g., bandwidth and latency. In this work, we showcase the capability to retain these two goals at the same time, via extending the 5Growth baseline architecture and designing a new data-plane pipeline, i.e., virtual queue, over the P4 switch. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, a proof-of-concept is presented serving different service requests over a mixed data path, including P4 switches and Open vSwitches (OvSs)

Performance isolation for network slices in Industry 4.0: The 5Growth approach

Network slicing plays a key role in the 5G ecosystem for verticals to introduce new use cases in the industrial sector, i.e., Industry 4.0. However, a widely recognized challenge of network slicing is to provide traffic isolation and concurrently satisfy diverse performance requirements, e.g., bandwidth and latency. Such challenge becomes even more important when serving a large number of network traffic flows under a resource-limited condition between distributed sites, e.g., factory floor and remote office. In this work, we present the capability to retain these two goals at the same time, by applying the virtual queue notion over a priority queuing based pipeline in P4 switch over software-defined networks. To examine the effectiveness of our approach, a proof-of-concept is setup to serve different requests of Industry 4.0 use cases over a mixed data path, including P4 switch and Open vSwitch, for a large number of network flows.This work was supported in part by the EU H2020 5GROWTH Project under Grant 856709

Cross-Functional resource orchestration in optical telco clouds

With communication endpoints given by mobile user devices and by elastically provisioned virtual resources, one of the main challenge of cloud-based service provisioning is to deploy a coordinated control of both data center and network resources in order to provide adaptive data delivery services and adequate service experience to cloud users. In this regard, flexible optical networks can play a fundamental role in telco clouds to effectively address bandwidth requirements of elastic data center operations. This paper presents a cross-functional orchestration platform able to coordinate the provision of cloud-based services with multi-granular data delivery services across flexible optical network. The architectural design is described along with orchestration policies that are compared in terms of blocking ratio of service requests against the level of utilization of network links

An Orchestrator of Network and Cloud Resources for Dynamic Provisioning of Mobile Virtual Network Functions

Virtualization of network functions combined with the cloud paradigm enables the derealization of mobile network functionalities in data-centers (DC). Such virtualized mobile network functions (MNF) can be then provisioned dynamically and flexibly, leading to more scalable and cost-effective mobile services. Although advantageous, the provisioning of mobile network functions imposes a significant burden on the DCs and on the transport network. Furthermore, derealization is expected to increase the latency. This paper focuses on the problem of provisioning on-demand resources in the DCs (storage/computational resources) and in the flexible optical network (network resources) interconnecting the DCs, in order to support MNFs. An orchestrator is proposed for handling the DC and network resources in a unified way. Two orchestration strategies targeting either the minimization of the latency or the blocking probability are presented and assessed through simulation. High performance improvement is achieved through the use of the unified orchestrator