z-TORCH: An Automated NFV Orchestration and Monitoring Solution

Autonomous management and orchestration (MANO) of virtualized resources and services, especially in large-scale NFV environments, is a big challenge owing to the stringent delay and performance requirements expected of a variety of network services. The quality of decision (QoD) of a MANO system depends on the quality and timeliness of the information that it receives from the underlying monitoring system. The data generated by monitoring systems is a significant contributor to the network and processing load of MANO systems, impacting thus their performance. This raises a unique challenge: how to jointly optimize the QoD of MANO systems while at the same minimizing their monitoring loads at runtime? This is the main focus of this paper. In this context we propose a novel automated NFV orchestration solution called z-TORCH (zero Touch Orchestration) that jointly optimizes the orchestration and monitoring processes by exploiting machine learning techniques. The objective is to enhance the QoD of MANO systems achieving a near-optimal placement of VNFs at minimum monitoring costs.This work has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 761536 (5G-Transformer project

MANOaaS: A Multi-Tenant NFV MANO for 5G Network Slices

The dramatic densification of connected mobile devices and the expected use cases from the vertical industry demand an innovative network design that meets upcoming stringent requirements. The adoption and harmonized integration of novel concepts, such as network functions virtualization and network programmability, enables the system to master the high expectation -- from the fifth generation communication network in support of flexibility -- to provide tailored and mutually isolated network slices, high performance, agility, and automation. This effectively involves a number of technical challenges for managing and orchestrating physical and virtualized slice resources by means of an advanced management and orchestration (MANO) system. This article sheds light on potential benefits and implementation aspects when the MANO framework is abstracted into customized and distributed MANO instances, thereby empowering the MANO-as-a-service (MANOaaS) paradigm. In particular, such distributed instances are provided to different network tenants for a greater level of control on requested network slice(s). The notion of management level agreements in the context of MANOaaS is introduced as well as differentiated per tenant while being embedded into the proposed architecture. We also position the proposed MANOaaS concept and associated extensions to the MANO reference architecture from the viewpoint of standardization bodies and ongoing open source projects.This work has been partially funded by the European Union Horizon-2020 Project 5G-CARMEN under Grant Agreement 825012 and Project 5G-Transformer under Grant Agreement 761536

A future-proof architecture for management and orchestration of multi-domain NextGen networks

The novel network slicing paradigm represents an effective turning point to operate future wireless networks. Available networking and computational resources may be shared across different (instantiations of) services tailored onto specific vertical needs, envisioned as the main infrastructure tenants. While such customization enables meeting advanced Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) introduced by upcoming 5G networks, advanced multi-tenancy approaches help to abate the cost of deploying and operating the network. However, the network slicing implementation requires a number of non-trivial practical considerations, including e.g. (i) how resource sharing operations are actually implemented, (ii) how involved parties establish the corresponding agreement to instantiate, operate and terminate such a sharing or, (iii) the design of functional modules and interfaces supporting these operations. In this paper, we present a novel framework that unveils proper answers to the above design challenges. While existing initiatives are typically limited to single-domain and single-owner scenarios, our framework overcomes these limitations by enlarging the administrative scope of the network deployments fostering different providers to collaborate so as to facilitate a larger set of resources even spread across multiple domains. Numerical evaluations confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the presented solution.This work was supported in part by the 5G-MoNArch Project, in part by the Phase II of the 5th Generation Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) Program, in part by the European Commission within the Horizon 2020 Framework Program under Grant 761445, in part by the 5G-MoNArch Project builds on the results of the 5G-PPP Phase I Project 5G-NORMA, and in part by the European Union Horizon 2020 Project 5G-CARMEN under Grant 825012. The work of UC3M has also received funding from the Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant 815074 - 5G EVE.Publicad

Network slicing with flexible mobility and QoS/QoE support for 5G networks

Proceeding of: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications. Workshops (ICC Workshops)Network slicing is an emerging area of research, featuring a logical arrangement of resources to operate as individual networks, thus allowing for massively customizable service and tenant requirements. The focus of this paper is to present the design of a flexible 5G architecture for network slicing, building on SDN and NFV technologies as enablers. More specifically, we place the emphasis on techniques that provide efficient utilization of substrate resources for network slicing, ultimately optimizing network performance. The key areas of consideration in our architecture revolve around flexible service-tailored mobility, service-aware QoS/QoE control as well as network-wide orchestrationThis research work has been performed in the framework of H2020-ICT-2014-2 project 5G NORMA

Optimizing the Performance of FMIPv6 by Proactive Proxy Bindings

protocol, a seamless handover protocol, that reduces packet loss during the handover process by tunneling packets from the MN’s previous IP subnet to the new IP subnet where they will get buffered. These buffered packets will get forwarded to the MN once it becomes IP capable in the new subnet. Although packet tunneling and buffering is an effective strategy to reduce packet loss during the handover process but it will not only incur a high tunneling load on the link between the previous and new subnets, especially for CBR traffic, but will also account towards increased processing load in the access routers due to successive tunneling and de-tunneling of packets. This tunneling load is also dependent on the timing of the FMIPv6 handover decision which in turn is directly dependent on the location and speed of the MN. In this paper we propose a mechanism called Proactive Bindings for FMIPv6 (PB-FMIPv6) which can remedy the above limitations. Simulation results have shown that our mechanism not only reduces the tunneling load during the handover process but it also decouples the handover decision from the location and/or speed of the MN