Orchestration Options

As new networks progressively incorporate different technologies and cloud infrastructures, becoming more heterogeneous in nature, the resource allocation and management processes are becoming more complex. On top of such a heterogeneous environment, new requirements on distributed service provisioning, programmability and multi-tenancy support leads the network and cloud control approaches towards a more unified orchestration. Such orchestration should take into account networking, cloud and service requirements. Currently, a number of different orchestration deployment options have emerged from the industry and standardization, with the most significant ones detailed below.

• OpenBaton [141]: OpenBaton, developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS and TU Berlin, ensures the development of virtual network infrastructure by adapting network functions to the specific cloud environment, providing a comprehensive implementation of the ETSI NFV MANO specification. The framework considers a generic Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM) for the life cycle of the VNFs, based on the corresponding descriptors, and a Juju10 _{(a service orchestration tool for the cloud) VNFM adapter in order to}

deploy Juju charms. Openbaton integrates two different engines: i) event management engine for dispatching and ii) auto scaling engine for managing scaling operations. A fault management system is also included for automatic run-time management where

monitoring information is gathered using Zabbix11(open source monitoring solution for network and application monitoring). Finally, it provides plugins for addition and deletion inside the orchestration logic.

• OSM [142]: Open Source Management and Orchestration (OSM) is an ETSI-hosted project to develop an Open Source NFV MANO software stack aligned with ETSI NFV. The framework offers SDN underlay control (integrating multiple SDN con- trollers), multi-site capability and multi-VIM capability with enhanced performance awareness. The architectural components contain: resource orchestrator (from the Telefonica discontinued OpenMano), VNF configuration component (Canonical Juju), network service orchestrator and Graphic User Interface (GUI) (RIFT.io12), virtualized infrastructure based on intel architecture, virtual infrastructure manager (OpenVIM13 and Openstack14) and finally service VNFs (Metaswitch15 and 6wind16).

• Cloudify [143]: Cloudify is an open source framework based on Topology and Orches- tration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), which acts as a cloud platform orchestrator. It provides a complete solution for automating and managing application development and DevOps processes on top of a multi-cloud environment. Cloudify eliminates the boundaries between orchestration and monitoring, assuring automatic reaction to pre-defined events with the appropriated corrective measures. It organizes workflow for environment setup, application installation, infrastructure management, scaling and fault recovery. Cloudify offers interoperability among diverse cloud platforms (e.g, VMware, Cloudstack, Amazon and Azure) and reduces multi-vendor lock in. A CLI based client is used to perform the different operations.

• M-CORD [144]: M-CORD is a cloud-native solution built on SDN, NFV and cloud technologies. It includes both virtualization of RAN functions and a virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) to enable mobile edge applications and innovative services using a micro-services architecture. M-CORD enables virtualization of the RAN and core network functions, while separating the control functions from the data plane enabling a unified network orchestration and managment. Moreover, it allows third parties to build mobile edge services facilitating localized applications. M-CORD offers a single SDN control plane following Open Network Operating System (ONOS) [145] to control the virtual network infrastructure, SDN and NFV resources based on openstack and TOSCA facilitating the deployment of VNFs and network slices, providing mobile services with the desired performance, orchestrated by XOS [146].

• T-NOVA [147]: T-NOVA is a management and orchestration platform for automated provisioning of Network Function as a Service (NFaaS) on top of virtualized infrastruc- tures. It leverages the benefits of SDN and cloud management architectures to enable automated provisioning, configuration, monitoring and efficient operations of VNFs.

11_{https://www.zabbix.com/} 12_{https://riftio.com/} 13_{https://github.com/nfvlabs/openvim} 14_{https://www.openstack.org/} 15_{https://www.metaswitch.com/} 16_{http://www.6wind.com/}

T-NOVA differs from the other frameworks in terms of an additional marketplace layer, which allows operators to offer their infrastructures as a value added service. This layer is placed on top of the orchestrator and contains a customer facing module for implementing business related functionalities in a multi-user setting, employing the paradigm of "APP-Store". T-NOVA follows the ETSI NFV architecture separating the VIM from the NFVI, which are based on Openstack and OpenDaylight. The orchestrator divides its functionalities into two modules, namely Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) and Virtual Resource Orchestrator (VRO). NSO maintains the lifecycle of the network services focusing on connectivity, and VRO manages compute, storage and network resources.

• ONAP [148]: Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) is an open source orchestra- tor project, carried out within the Linux Foundation with the support of AT&T, China Mobile and other leading industry partners. It is an initiative created by the combination of the Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) and Open Orchestrator (OPEN-O) projects, into ONAP, to bring the capabilities for designing, creating, orchestrating and handling of the full lifecycle management of VNFs, SDNs, and the services that all of these things entail. ONAP allows the end users to connect products and services through the infrastructure, and allows deployments of VNFs and scaling of the network, in a fully automated manner. ONAP expands the scope of ETSI MANO, introducing the notion of the resource controller and policy component as well as the concept of resource description, i.e., meta-data, for lifecycle management of the virtual environment enabling network agility and elasticity, while improving the time-to-market. It follows a hierarchy of three orchestration modules consisting of: i) the Global Service-Orchestrator that enables end-to-end service composition and delivery, ii) the NFV-Orchestrator responsible for NFV orchestration, considering diverse VNFs across a wide range of VNFMs and VIMs and iii) the SDN-Orchestrator that provides network connectivity and traffic steering via the means of different SDNs controllers (e.g., OpenDaylight and ONOS), and/or the conventional element management systems.

ONAP adopts TOSCA, YANG and Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) data models, Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs, Openstack and supports resource abstraction over diverse SDN, NFV and legacy networks, allowing a set of common services including policy management, security and other management capabilities.