Gearing up support systems for software
defined and virtualized networks
CARLOS BRAVO, FRANCESCO CARUSO, CHRISTIAN OLROG, MALGORZATA SVENSSON, AND ANDRÁS VALKÓ
Gearing up support systems for software
defined and virtualized networks
The business environment of operators and service providers is going through a fundamental
transformation. By 2020, more than half
1of the envisioned 50 billion devices will already be
connected. And while the ever-expanding use of connectivity presents a major growth opportunity,
it also creates new and tougher demands on networks – and particularly on the processes for
managing users and devices.
The key to success in the digi-tal market is the ability to adapt, and true business agility (illustrated in
Figure 1) requires flexibility in all three dimensions: networks, services, and customers.
Network agility
Cloud, SDN and NFV are key elements of network agility: the capability to effi-ciently plan and build networks, adapt them to changing requirements, and provide superior service quality.
Service agility
The keys to achieving service agility are: the ability to create new services rapidly, to launch and deliver superior- quality services with ease, and to be able to monetize them.
Customer agility
The keys to achieving customer agility are: the ability to interact with consum-ers in a way that is flexible and dynamic, the ability to expose new services, and the means to proactively resolve prob-lems or react to issues rapidly.
Network agility
Both SDN and NFV play key roles in gear-ing up to the level of network agility needed to explore the opportunities and address the challenges presented by the Networked Society and the digi-tal economy.
The concept of network virtualiza-tion – providing physical network resources as virtualized entities – has already been successfully applied to tele-com networks. Examples of this type of network partitioning include VPNs Gearing up
Business agility is one way to respond to the trends of digitalization and pressed profit margins. By being able to apply technologies that increase the level of flexibility in networks, operators and service providers can gear up from deliv-ering network infrastructure to becom-ing providers of innovation platforms. To do this, valuable assets (like net-work infrastructure, the subscriber base, user identities, security creden-tials, location and mobility information, service and product catalogs, charging and billing functions, connected device identities, and many more capabilities that can be used to create digital ser-vices) need to be leveraged in new ways. In the digital economy, only a few players will own all the assets that are needed to create attractive services. Typically, assets from different players will be combined dynamically in col-laborative organizations. Operators will blend their capabilities together with partner assets to expose novel services. The result: innovation, mashed services, and highly satisfied users.
BOX A Terms and abbreviations API application programming interface
ETSI European Telecommunications Standards Institute
NF network function
NFV Network Functions Virtualization
NFVI Network Function Virtual Infrastructure
OSS/BSS operations support systems/business support systems
PNF physical network function
SDN software-defined networking
SE service enablement
SOA service-oriented architecture
TTM time to market
vApp virtual appliance
vDC virtual data center
VIM Virtual Infrastructure Management
VNF Virtual Network Function
Parallel to the connectivity revolution, the digital economy has triggered a transformation in the way services are produced and consumed. Enabled by the global communication infrastructure, a new market of digital services is emerging. In this market, people and organizations can expose their digital assets, which can be rapidly combined with partner assets to create new, more useful, and more interesting services. Communication networks have a key responsibility: to provide the platform that enables the digital market to con-tinue to develop. This responsibility pres-ents operators and service providers with a unique opportunity. However, this opportunity is offset by the challenges of price pressure as well as the perceived commoditization of networks.
So, to capture the digital market opportunity, both telecom networks and support systems – OSS/BSS – need to gear up.
and VLANs. In 2012, a group of service providers launched the NFV initiative. Their aim was to apply best practices from the IT industry – as it virtualized data centers and server rooms – to the telecom domain. In other words, how can network elements be virtualized so that the maximum benefit from com-modity-computing technologies can be achieved, while improving service agil-ity and service efficiency at the same time? The short answer is NFV and SDN.
NFV
From a technical point of view, NFV pro-motes the decoupling of network func-tions (NFs) from hardware. By applying virtualization technologies, the soft-ware of network functions can be bro-ken apart from hardware appliances. In turn, this separation unleashes mas-sive flexibility in terms of how NFs can be dynamically deployed, elastically resized, and offered on an on-demand basis. Some of the potential benefits of this flexibility are reduced cost and lower power consumption, but gains can also be made in terms of increased speed and efficiency in the deployment of telecom networks.
SDN
SDN provides the ability to program-matically define and manage networks, which enables the complexity of under-lying implementation to be abstracted from the applications that run on the network and consume resources. From a technical point of view, SDN enables separation of the data plane from the control plane.
Service providers typically use SDN to take a holistic view of their networks, applying SDN concepts across network layers and domains, which in turn enables end-to-end programmabilty.
SDN and NFV together
Originally, the aim of combining NFV and SDN was to decouple services from resources, but when these two tech-nologies come together, they provide the additional benefit of detaching life cycle management from physical con-straints. Today, it is possible to provision an SDN/NFV service instantaneously without the need to deploy new physi-cal resources. This flexibility is the foun-dation of network agility.
Service agility
At Ericsson, OSS/BSS are designed according to a functional decomposi-tion of network architecture domains that natively account for SDN and NFV.
Similar to network agility, SDN and NFV play key roles in gearing up the level of service agility.
Figure 2 shows the OSS/BSS and ser-vice enablement (SE) architecture for SDN/NFV-enabled networks. The dia-gram highlights the main functional blocks: OSS/BSS and SE, network func-tions, equipment (representing the col-lection of physical resources), the cloud system infrastructure, and transport.
Figure 2 OSS/BSS architecture for SDN/NFV-enabled networks
An NF can be supported by native (non-virtualized, physical NF) or by virtual (a virtualized application or a virtualized NF) resources. From a man-agement point of view, NFs are governed across two orthogonal planes:
the network function domain management plane – illustrated as NF domain management in Figure 2; and the supporting resources management plane – illustrated as vApp management, in Figure 2.
The NF domain-management plane sup-ports operational needs of NFs, such as
fault management, performance man-agement and specific configuration for NFs; while vApp management handles resources required by a network func-tion throughout its life cycle.
The cloud-system-infrastructure func-tion aggregates and manages virtual resources (see Box B) across different instances and technologies, offered by cloud system infrastructures (in ETSI terminology NFVI + VIM).
Cloud deployments often span sev-eral different physical sites joined through a connectivity fabric, which may have a separate management func-tion. This fabric, illustrated by transport in Figure 2, can be orchestrated together with the resource infrastructure using SDN, effectively implementing a vDC (or a virtual resource slice) that provides a network service – see Box C.
The functions in the OSS/BSS and SE plane are:
experience and assurance – offering service assurance;
customer and partner interaction – enabling both parties to interact with support systems through multiple communication channels; order management;
revenue management – providing Customer/partner management
and interaction MAKE ITEASY
MAKE IT BETTER MAKE IT ACTIONABLE MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE MAKE IT PAY MAKE IT HAPPEN MAKE IT REAL MAKE IT WORK Experience-to-resolution Service-to-cash Lead-to-service Idea-to-implementation Data-to-experience Customer agility Service agility Network agility
Network and cloud management
Plan-to-provision
FIGURE 1 Business agility
A virtual resource is an abstraction of a physical resource – compute, storage, or network. Virtual resources can be shared among multiple consumers in such a way that they appear to be dedicated.
BOX B Virtual resource
with other assets into product offerings. These support systems also handle prod-uct life cycle management, the capa-bility to charge for products, and the process for exposing products to users and partners.
However, one of the most significant challenges for operators and service pro-viders today is time to market (TTM). One way to shorten the time from con-cept to delivery is to have a good under-standing of business processes, so that the level of automation in processes can be raised. By having well-documented business processes, preconfigured solu-tions and suites can be delivered, which in turn enables additional business pro-cess innovation and increased speed when introducing new offerings, all while maintaining flexibility and the ability to integrate.
As SDN and NFV facilitate new ser-vices, these technologies have greatest impact on the business processes that lie between the formation of an idea and its implementation – such as planning, design and deployment.
Figure 3 illustrates some of the activ-ities included in the ideas-to-imple-mentation process. It shows a possible scenario for creating a product offering from the services and resources man-aged by several functional domains.
Within OSS/BSS, the key logical func-tion of the idea-to-implementafunc-tion process is the business logic creation environment, which is illustrated in Figure 3. Resource and service specifi-cations as well as product offerings are created in this environment, which all result in a product catalog entry.
The idea-to-implementation process can be broken down into a number of specification phases: network function, resource, and service specification.
Network function specification
Domain management uses the informa-tion provided in the NF specificainforma-tion to build the resources needed to construct the desired services. In some cases, this is a ready-to-use specification provided by the NF vendor.
Resource specifications
The virtual infrastructure resources needed by the NFs that the cloud system infrastructure will expose need to be specified. These resources are described
the capabilities to charge and invoice for any type of product or service usage; resource management – providing a unified resource inventory for both virtual and physical resources; service inventory;
customer/partner management; enterprise catalog – consisting of products, services and resources; and service enablement – providing service exposure capabilities to partners for service innovation.
The OSS/BSS and SE plane in SDN/NFV-enabled networks provides capabilities to introduce new virtual NFs or vApps
progressively. In other words, new vir-tual NFs or vApps can be instantiated in a dedicated slice (see Box C) called trial. At the same time, an instance of the same NF can be executing in another slice – called production. The redirec-tion of users from the old to the new NF/ application can be carried out gradually, with minimum impact, and managed programmatically in a way that is trans-parent to users of the service.
Rapid business innovation
Support systems – OSS/BSS – provide the necessary functions to encapsulate SDN/NFV services and combine them
OSS/BSS and SE Network function Cloud system infrastructure Transport Equipment Experience
assurance Customerpartner Enterprisecatalog interaction Customer partner management Order management NF domain management Non-virtualized application System infra-structure Transport SDN-C SDN-C SDN-C Virtualized application Transport domain management vApp
management managementCloud SI
Revenue
management managementResource inventoryService enablementService
FIGURE 2 OSS/BSS architecture for SDN/NFV-enabled networks
A vDC is an instance of a data center operated on a per-tenant basis, with flexible network topology and basic services – compute, network, and storage – as well as more complex ones such as firewalling and load balancing. A vDC may span multiple physical data centers or be constrained to a subset of the infrastructure within a single DC.
A virtual resource slice, referred to as a slice, is an isolated view of the virtual resources – a vDC in other words.
A network service (NS) is composed of VNFs, PNFs, virtual links and VNF forwarding graphs that support the communication service.
using vDC and vApp templates, and may be provided by the vendor.
Service specification
Describes how transport service con-nectivity could also be exposed and bun-dled together with the target services defined by the market’s needs into prod-uct offerings. These prodprod-uct offerings may be targeted to any segment, such as media providers or health care provid-ers. The service specification includes characteristics that define specifics of the service in relation to requirements of the target segment.
The catalog-driven approach facil-itates onboarding of new services, through simple modeling based on prin-ciples like modularity for defining ser-vices and reusability to construct richer and aggregated services and product offerings. It is one of the main pillars of the ideas-to-implementation process, complemented by ease of integration through standard interfaces and pre-integration and automation of the end-to-end processes.
Instantly available services
Virtualization of network functions and the decoupling of software from hard-ware enable full automation of the lead-to-service process (shown in Figure 4) across functional domains. Automating this process includes instantiation of the entire software stack of NFs that are encapsulated in a service, reducing time from order to service activation, and improving resource utilization – as resources become allocated shortly before use.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and innovative micro-services provide programmable interfaces designed according to well-established industry standards and make major contribu-tions to orchestration and automation. They are some of the key architecture principles, which together with a com-mon information model expose services using APIs, enabling ease of integration – as described in a previous Ericsson Review article2. These key principles
allow the instantiation of NFs and the resources needed. They facilitate the creation of product offerings from ser-vices and resources defined in different domains – OSS/BSS, transport, cloud sys-tem infrastructure, and IT.
FIGURE 3 Idea to implementation
Business logic creation environment OSS/BSS Network
function Cloud systeminfrastructure Transport IT
Access Resource spec Read resource spec Service spec Read service spec Define service spec ... ... ... ... ... ... Assurance logic spec Charging logic spec Add assurance logic Customer segment spec Add customer segment Product offering Publish product offering Service
enablement managementDomain Cloud SIdomain managementCustomer management
Resource
inventory inventoryService Servicecatalog Productcatalog Add charging logic Orchestration creation environment Orchestration execution OSS/BSS Network function Cloud system infrastructure Transport IT Access ... ... ... Handle customer order Handle customer request Handle service order Activate resources Service
enablement managementDomain managementDomain
Service catalog Product catalog Resource order Cloud SI domain management Customer
interaction Customerorder Productorder Serviceorder
Customer agility
Similar to network and service agility, SDN and NFV play key roles in gearing up the level of customer agility.
In the digital economy, the role of partnerships and ecosystems is more significant than traditional econo-mies. Digitalized businesses collab-orate more, and combine their assets together with partner assets to provide customers with the best services. In this environment, new ways that enable mashed offerings, service exposure, and blended services are needed.
Service enablement, as shown in Figure 2, includes the functions needed to enable operators and service provid-ers to monetize their assets and connect to others.
Service exposure, one of the core functions within SE, provides access to
network capabilities exposed by the ser-vice development environment through programmable interfaces. Exposure enables developers – either at the oper-ator, a partner or a 3PP – to design and compose innovative services.
Support systems – OSS/BSS – provide the capabilities to manage partners and developers, to handle all commu-nication channels, and to organize the administration of products and services. Technologies like SDN and OpenStack provide developers with programmable interfaces, which can be used together with OSS/BSS capabilities so that new services can be deployed and executed in isolated virtual environments.
In addition to exposing network pro-grammability through OpenStack and OpenDaylight APIs, developers have access to other services and capabilities
like user identification, charging and network policies, and configuration information to program NFs.
New business opportunities The virtualization of NFs enables oper-ators and service providers to develop new services for traditional segments, as well as providing the possibility to enter new markets. For example, virtu-alization enables bundles that include connectivity services to be mashed with value-add services and exposed in a one-stop-shop fashion, which can be created and offered to various indus-try verticals.
Traditionally, a connectivity services offering for industry verticals tends pro-vide network connectivity optimized for the specific vertical. In a virtual-ized environment, optimization is sim-plified, as NFs can be instantiated for a particular vertical, as illustrated in
Figure 5.
This illustration shows how NFs and support systems interact. NFs enable the connectivity to connect everything in the network together – such as mobile phones and other handheld devices, as well as cars, and health care and trans-portation equipment. And the support systems – OSS/BSS – manage the NFs and translate their capabilities into tan-gible services that can be offered to any industry vertical through operator and service provider capabilities.
Operational simplicity and efficiency
Software-defined networking usually refers to the unbundling or separation of the control plane and the forward-ing plane of network elements. It can be solved in many ways, and OpenFlow is a commonly used protocol. Traditionally, management functions have typically interacted with interfaces exposed by the control plane but with SDN, the separated forwarding plane becomes a managed entity in itself.
The separation SDN provides results in fewer control planes; this in turn makes it easier to align the different types and versions of control planes and raises the bar for the least common denominator of functionality. Taken to the extreme, this concept results in a single SDN controller being sufficient, and so provides the benefits associated with reduced network complexity. FIGURE 5 Providing new services with NFV
Instance 4 Instance 3 Instance 2 OSS/BSS Network functions Health care
provider providerMedia providerMedia Any industryverticle
EPC-4 HSS-4 IMS-3 EPC-3 RAN HSS-3 IMS-2 EPC-2 HSS-2 Instance 1 EPC-1 HSS-1
unified model promoting reuse, auto-mation, speed and correctness.
The concepts of the virtual data cen-ter (vDC) and the virtual resource slice enable services to be deployed in paral-lel, and in controlled isolation. This type of parallel deployment adds flexibility – because it, for example, enables oper-ators and service providers to run differ-ent versions of multi-tenant appliances, which can be dimensioned on demand, and enables services to be personalized. The ability to improve speed and cor-rectness is a key ingredient of innova-tion. By containing risk and ensuring failures are detected early (failing fast), operators and service providers can test more concepts, and do this not just for services and applications, but also for different market segments.
The concept of time to market is changing. Traditionally, TTM was about getting a version of a service into the hands of paying customers as quickly While SDN is not a prerequisite for
efficient reconfiguration of network resources, it does provide a solid foun-dation for network agility. For example, separation has already led to improve-ments and new forwarding service par-adigms like service chaining3,4.
Operational efficiency – not just for the single service but the entire deliv-ery operation – is greatly enhanced by implementing an SDN fabric that sup-ports dynamic, automated and model-driven reconfiguration. Furthermore, when applications are added to the SDN controller dynamically, the possibil-ity to perform dynamic protocol ana-lytics increases, which in turn eases troubleshooting.
In an NFV context, both SDN control-lers and forwarding elements can be deployed as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Typically, hypervisors already include a software-defined forwarding function that is SDN capable, which can work in conjunction with physical for-warding elements.
Innovation in SDN networks
One of the primary reasons to shift to SDN is the potential increase in flexibil-ity and agilflexibil-ity. However, it does not nec-essarily follow that the introduction of a given technology automatically leads to improved agility and more stream-lined operations. Typically, the adop-tion of a new technical model follows a hype curve – adoption takes place once business value has been identified, and proper abstractions are in place to sim-plify the application of the technology. In a previous Ericsson Review article, the concept of Service Provider SDN4
was coined. This concept takes a holis-tic view of SDN, extending it beyond the data center to include abstractions that enable services to be built that leverage all the functions of the entire network. Shifting to SDN/NFV
By nature, SDN and NFV are disruptive technologies, and as such, tend to fos-ter rapid innovation. They bring about changes that fundamentally alter the traditional way networks have been managed and developed.
As enablers of automation, NFV and SDN make full use of one of the key architectural OSS/BSS principles – a catalog-driven approach based on a
as possible. Today, TTM is about how quickly the changing needs of modern consumers can be detected, and how quickly they can be reacted to.
The OSS and BSS naturally play a key role in enabling the operation of this new paradigm. Automating the dif-ferent flows required, from the idea of the new service to the implementation and operation of it, ensures operators and service providers are in full control of their network and services, and are empowered to act on insights and how they are used.
The concepts of SDN, NFV and the vir-tual data center, as well as rapid adap-tion to changing consumer needs, form the pillars upon which network, service and customer agility are built.
FIGURE 6 Software-defined networking
Operator A Operator B OSS/BSS SDN app SDN app specific API Root SDN controller Child SDN controller Forwarding element Router OSPF (for example) BGP (for example) Data plane SDN controller management i/f Transport management i/f Transport management i/f Settlement Element management i/f Peer routing domain Peer OSS/BSS
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Volume: 92, 2015
integration. He joined Ericsson in 2000 and has worked in all stages of product life cycle in Ericsson, from design to delivery and execution. He holds an M.Sc. in telematics engineering from the Higher Technical School of Engineering (ETSI), Seville, Spain.
András Valkó
is responsible for architecture and technology within Ericsson OSS Portolio and Solutions. He has nearly 20 years’ experience in the telecom industry, mostly within the area of network management and OSS, with a focus on service assurance, analytics, performance management, automation, and self-organizing networks. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science and has a technical research background. Before his current assignment, he was head of Customer Experience Management and Analytics, and previously led the Ericsson Research unit for network management and OSS/BSS.
Malgorzata Svensson
is an expert and OSS/BSS chief architect at Business Unit Support Solutions at Ericsson. She has over 15 years’ experience with operation and business support systems. She joined Ericsson in 1996 and has been involved in research and development in areas ranging from revenue management, IMS, analytics, cloud and SDN.
1. Ericsson, June 2015, Mobility Report, available at: http://www.ericsson.com/ mobility-report
2. Ericsson, 2014, Ericsson Review, Architecture evolution for automation and network programmability, available at: http://www.ericsson.com/news/141128-er-architecture-evolution_244099435_c
3. ETSI, 2014, Group Specification, Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV); Architectural Framework, available at: http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gs/ NFV/001_099/002/01.02.01_60/gs_ NFV002v010201p.pdf
4. Ericsson, 2014, Ericsson Review, Software-defined networking: the service provider perspective, available at: http://www.ericsson.com/ news/130221-software-defined- networking-the-service-provider-perspective_244129229_c
References
program to transition OSS to the cloud environment and to extend OSS into the cloud-management domain. He has more than 20 years’ expertise in the telecom OSS domain and holds an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy.
Christian Olrog
is an expert in cloud service delivery architecture and chief architect at Business Unit Support Solutions at Ericsson. He joined the department of New and Special Business Operations at Ericsson in 1999 and has been involved in research and development in areas ranging from wireless LAN standardization and IP security to embedded devices and enterprise applications. He holds an M.Sc. in physics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the colleagues who have contributed to this article: Lars Angelin, Henrik Basilier Jan Friman Ignacio Más, and John Quilty.
