A control and management architecture supporting autonomic NFV services

Abstract

The proposed control, orchestration and management (COM) architecture is presented from a high-level point of view; it enables the dynamic provisioning of services such as network data connectivity or generic network slicing instances based on virtual network functions (VNF). The COM is based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles and is hierarchical, with a dedicated controller per technology domain. Along with the SDN control plane for the provisioning of connectivity, an ETSI NFV management and orchestration system is responsible for the instantiation of Network Services, understood in this context as interconnected VNFs. A key, novel component of the COM architecture is the monitoring and data analytics (MDA) system, able to collect monitoring data from the network, datacenters and applications which outputs can be used to proactively reconfigure resources thus adapting to future conditions, like load or degradations. To illustrate the COM architecture, a use case of a Content Delivery Network service taking advantage of the MDA ability to collect and deliver monitoring data is experimentally demonstrated.