Research Area: Software Defined Networks
Network services underpin operator revenues, and value-added services provide income beyond core (voice and data) infrastructure capability. Today, operators face multiple challenges: a need to innovate and offer a wider choice of value-added services, whilst increasing network scale, bandwidth and flexibility. They must also reduce operational costs, and deploy services far faster - in minutes rather than days or weeks.In the recent years, the network community, motivated by the aforementioned challenges, has developed production network architectures and seeded technologies, like Software Defined Networking, Application-based Network Operations and Network Function Virtualization. These technologies enhance the highly desired properties for elasticity, agility and cost-effectiveness in the operator environment. A key requirement to fully exploit the benefits of these new architectures and technologies is a fundamental shift in management and control of resources, and the ability to orchestrate the network infrastructure: coordinate the instantiation of high-level network services across different technological domains and automate service deployment and re-optimization.This paper surveys existing standardization efforts for the orchestration - automation, coordination, and management - of complex set of network and function resources (both physical and virtual), and highlights the various enabling technologies, strengths and weaknesses, adoption challenges for operators, and areas where further research is required.
Keywords:
Network Service
Orchestration
SDN
NFV
Standardization
Author(s) Name: Charalampos Rotsos, Daniel King, Arsham Farshad, Jamie Bird, Lyndon Fawcett, Nektarios Georgalas, Matthias Gunkel, Kohei Shiomoto, Aijun Wang, Andreas Mauthe, Nicholas Race, David Hutchison
Journal name: Computer Standards & Interfaces
Conferrence name:
Publisher name: Elsevier
DOI: 10.1016/j.csi.2016.12.006
Volume Information: Volume 54, Part 4, November 2017, Pages 203-215
