Understand Your Chains: Towards Performance Profile-based Network Service Management

Allocating resources to virtualized network functions and services to meet service level agreements is a challenging task for NFV management and orchestration systems. This becomes even more challenging when agile development methodologies, like DevOps, are applied. In such scenarios, management and orchestration systems are continuously facing new versions of functions and services which makes it hard to decide how much resources have to be allocated to them to provide the expected service performance. One solution for this problem is to support resource allocation decisions with performance behavior information obtained by profiling techniques applied to such network functions and services. In this position paper, we analyze and discuss the components needed to generate such performance behavior information within the NFV DevOps workflow. We also outline research questions that identify open issues and missing pieces for a fully integrated NFV profiling solution. Further, we introduce a novel profiling mechanism that is able to profile virtualized network functions and entire network service chains under different resource constraints before they are deployed on production infrastructure.Comment: Submitted to and accepted by the European Workshop on Software Defined Networks (EWSDN) 201

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

Enhancing development and deployment of softwarised network services

Zukünftige Kommunikationsnetze erfordern ein hohes Maß an Flexibilität, Agilität und Verwaltbarkeit, welches mit Hardware-basierenden Netzwerkkonzepten und Netzwerkimplementierungen nicht erreicht werden kann. Ein Lösungsansatz, um diese Einschränkungen zu beseitigen ist die Netzwerkfunktionen in Software zu implementieren. Dies erlaubt es, die Netzwerkfunktionen schnell zu entwickeln und bereitzustellen, mehrere Netzwerkfunktionen einfach zu komplexeren Netzwerkdiensten zu verbinden sowie diese nach Bedarf zu skalieren und voll-automatisiert zu konfigurieren. Diese Transformation wird auch als „Network Softwarisation“ bezeichnet und ersetzt die klassischen Abläufe für die Netzplanung, den Netzentwurf und den Netzbetrieb durch Softwareentwicklungsprozesse. Hierdurch ergeben sich viele neue Herausforderungen für die Netzbetreiber.Diese Dissertation untersucht diese Herausforderungen und präsentiert sowohl Konzepte, als auch konkrete Lösungen, um die Entwicklung und Bereitstellung von softwarebasierten Netzwerkfunktionen und Netzwerkdiensten zu vereinfachen. Zunächst untersuche ich die Probleme die beim Entwickeln von statusbehafteten Netzwerkfunktionen, welche ihren Zustand während und nach dynamischen Konfigurationsänderungen beibehalten müssen, auftreten. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit beantworte ich die Frage, wie man einzelne Netzwerkfunktionen und komplexe Netzwerkdienste mit wenig Aufwand prototypisch umsetzen und in realistischen Szenarien testen kann. Im dritten Teil der Arbeit untersuche ich Benchmarking-Ansätze zum Sammeln von Vergleichsinformationen, um die Leistungsfähigkeit von Netzwerkfunktionen und -diensten zu charakterisieren. Mit Hilfe dieser Informationen kann dann der Entscheidungsprozess zum Ressourcenbedarf bei der Bereitstellung der Funktion oder des Dienstes vollautomatisiert unterstützt werden.Future communication networks require a new level of flexibility, agility, and manageability that cannot be achieved by hardware-based network designs. A solution for this is transforming the involved hardware elements into software components, which can be quickly developed and deployed, flexibly scaled on-demand, and automatically managed. This transformation is called network softwarisation and changes classical network planning, design, and operation tasks into software development processes, creating new challenges for network operators.This thesis explores those challenges and introduces concepts and solutions to simplify the development and deployment of softwarised network functions and services. I first investigate the problem of developing stateful network functions that must maintain and share their state during dynamic network reconfigurations, e.g., scaling. In the second part, I answer the question of how to quickly prototype and test single network functions as well as complex network services in multi-site network topologies. In the third part, I explore the use of performance benchmarking solutions to collect performance characteristics of virtualised network functions and services to support automated resource dimensioning decisions during deployment.Manuel Peuster ; [Referees: Prof. Dr. Holger Karl, Paderborn University, Germany, Prof. Dr. Antonio Capone, Politecnico di Milano, Italy]Tag der Verteidigung: 16.01.2020Universität Paderborn, Dissertation, 202

A fully integrated multi-platform NFV SDK

A key challenge of network function virtualization (NFV) is the complexity of developing and deploying new network services. Currently, development requires many manual steps that are time-consuming and error-prone (e.g., for creating service descriptors). Furthermore, existing management and orchestration (MANO) platforms only offer limited support of standardized descriptor models or package formats, limiting the re-usability of network services. To this end, we introduce a fully integrated, open-source NFV service development kit (SDK) with multi-MANO platform support. Our SDK simplifies many NFV service development steps by offering initial generation of descriptors, advanced project management, as well as fully automated packaging and submission for on-boarding. To achieve multi-platform support, we present a package format that extends ETSI's VNF package format. In this demonstration, we present the end-to-end workflow to develop an NFV service that is then packaged for multiple platforms, i.e., 5GTANGO and OSM

Demonstrating on-demand cell switching with a two-layer mobile network testbed

Traditional cellular networks are forced to remain active regardless of the actual amount of traffic that is currently produced/requested, with a clear waste of energy. Two-layer mobile networks with separated signalling and data layers have been recently proposed for energy savings in future implementations. These networks are able to switch off unneeded data cells completely while maintaining full coverage with their signalling cells, thus saving energy. In this demonstration, we showcase a testbed that uses Wi-Fi access points to emulate small cells of the data layer and a publicly available cellular connection as the signalling layer. The testbed is used to demonstrate the general feasibility of this layered architecture and to facilitate experiments with network-wide resource optimization

Empowering network service developers : enhanced NFV DevOps and programmable MANO

Although network functions virtualization redefined the role of the network service developer, existing concepts that are supposed to enable them are still limited, cumbersome, and time consuming in regard to the promised flexibility. This article describes how to move forward from these initial steps, identifies the challenges network service developers face during both development and runtime, and explains how to overcome them with our SCK and programmable MANO framework. We detail how our SCK facilitates the service creation process, resulting in two enhanced NFV DevOps cycles, test flexibility and quicker service development. We elaborate on our programmable MANO framework with both architectural considerations and a use case, to depict its customizability by network service developers, giving them fine-grained control over their service throughout its end-to-end operational life cycle

DevOps for network function virtualisation: An architectural approach

The Service Programming and Orchestration for Virtualised Software Networks (SONATA) project targets both the flexible programmability of software networks and the optimisation of their deployments by means of integrating Development and Operations in order to accelerate industry adoption of software networks and reduce time‐to‐market for networked services. SONATA supports network function chaining and orchestration, making service platforms modular and easier to customise to the needs of different service providers, and introduces a specialised Development and Operations model for supporting developers

Introducing automated verification and validation for virtualized network functions and services

NFV and SDN transform network management and operation into agile development tasks. They involve software artefacts, which are managed and deployed as composite services using DevOps principles. Those softwarized networks rely on complex technology stacks, starting with low-level virtualization technologies and ranging up to machine-learning-based orchestration solutions. One of the main challenges in those environments is to verify that the deployed functions and services operate correctly and meet the quality goals set by the stakeholders before they are put into production. We tackle this challenge by introducing the novel concept of a verification and validation (V&V) platform for NFV, which enables automatic testing and qualification of single network functions and complex services. By adding such a platform to the NFV ecosystem, new business models emerge, as we discuss in this article. We evaluate our proposed concepts by presenting a case study that uses our open source V&V platform to verify and validate the behavior and performance of a real-world network service