scholarly journals End-to-end network slicing enabled through network function virtualization

Author(s):  
Ibrahim Afolabi ◽  
Miloud Bagaa ◽  
Tarik Taleb ◽  
Hannu Flinck
Informatics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Papadakis-Vlachopapadopoulos ◽  
Ioannis Dimolitsas ◽  
Dimitrios Dechouniotis ◽  
Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou ◽  
Ioanna Roussaki ◽  
...  

With the advent of 5G verticals and the Internet of Things paradigm, Edge Computing has emerged as the most dominant service delivery architecture, placing augmented computing resources in the proximity of end users. The resource orchestration of edge clouds relies on the concept of network slicing, which provides logically isolated computing and network resources. However, though there is significant progress on the automation of the resource orchestration within a single cloud or edge cloud datacenter, the orchestration of multi-domain infrastructure or multi-administrative domain is still an open challenge. Towards exploiting the network service marketplace at its full capacity, while being aligned with ETSI Network Function Virtualization architecture, this article proposes a novel Blockchain-based service orchestrator that leverages the automation capabilities of smart contracts to establish cross-service communication between network slices of different tenants. In particular, we introduce a multi-tier architecture of a Blockchain-based network marketplace, and design the lifecycle of the cross-service orchestration. For the evaluation of the proposed approach, we set up cross-service communication in an edge cloud and we demonstrate that the orchestration overhead is less than other cross-service solutions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 2782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adeel Rafiq ◽  
Asif Mehmood ◽  
Talha Ahmed Khan ◽  
Khizar Abbas ◽  
Muhammad Afaq ◽  
...  

On-demand service is the main feature of the 5G network, and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides it by virtualizing the existing 5G network infrastructure. NFV crafts various virtual networks on a shared physical network, but one of the core challenges in future 5G networks is to automate the modeling of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) and end-to-end Network Service (NS) orchestration with less human interaction. Traditionally, the descriptor of VNF and NS is created manually, which requires expert-level skills. This manual approach has a big threat of human error, which can be avoided by using the Intent-Based Networking (IBN) approach. The IBN approach eliminates the requirement of expertise for designing VNFs and NS by taking users’ intentions as an input. In this paper, the proposed system presents the Intent Management System for VNF modeling and end-to-end NS orchestration for multi-platforms. This system takes the high-level information related to a specific service, configures it accordingly, and converts it into the selected platform. The proposed system is tested using Mobile Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (M-CORD) and Open-Source Management and Orchestration (OSM) orchestrators. The results section shows that the proposed system reduces the effort of the end-user in creating network slices and provides seamless end-to-end service orchestration.


The traditional network is configured based on the prescribed network requirements. Sometimes the resources of the network are underutilized and at sometimes there may resource starvation because of the static configuration of the network. As against traditional network, which is operated either as dedicated network or as an overlay network, network services can be operated over a shared network infrastructure. Thus maximum resource utilization under minimal infrastructure cost can be achieved. The on-demand network requirement can be configured dynamically using network slice. The backbone of the rapidly evolving 5G technology is network slice and service networks can be benefited from it. Different network function for multiple tenants can be enabled customized using network slice with each slice operating independently. Network slice can be offered as a service to meet various requirements from the network slice tenant with different granularities. The Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization are the enabling technologies for network slice. This paper discusses various network slicing use case requirements. And also OpenFlow based software defined network environment is simulated to validate the discussions. Experimental results show that the efficiency of the service network is maximized with improved reliability of service


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danyang Zheng ◽  
Gangxiang Shen ◽  
Xiaojun Cao ◽  
Biswanath Mukherjee

<div>Emerging 5G technologies can significantly reduce end-to-end service latency for applications requiring strict quality of service (QoS). With network function virtualization (NFV), to complete a client’s request from those applications, the client’s data can sequentially go through multiple service functions (SFs) for processing/analysis but introduce additional processing delay. To reduce the processing delay from the serially-running SFs, network function parallelism (NFP) that allows multiple SFs to run in parallel is introduced. In this work, we study how to apply NFP into the SF chaining and embedding process such that the latency, including processing and propagation delays, can be jointly minimized. We introduce a novel augmented graph to address the parallel relationship constraint among the required SFs. Considering parallel relationship constraints, we propose a novel problem called parallelism-aware service function chaining and embedding (PSFCE). For this problem, we propose a near-optimal maximum parallel block gain (MPBG) first optimization algorithm when computing resources at each physical node are enough to host the required SFs. When computing resources are limited, we propose a logarithm-approximate algorithm, called parallelism-aware SFs deployment (PSFD), to jointly optimize processing and propagation delays. We conduct extensive simulations on multiple network scenarios to evaluate the performances of our schemes. Accordingly, we find that (i) MPBG is near-optimal, (ii) the optimization of end-to-end service latency largely depends on the processing delay in small networks and is impacted more by the propagation delay in large networks, and (iii) PSFD outperforms the schemes directly extended from existing works regarding end-to-end latency.</div>


Author(s):  
Raphael V. Rosa ◽  
Christian Esteve Rothenberg

Towards end-to-end network slicing, diverse envisioned 5G services (eg, augmented reality, vehicular communications, IoT) Call for advanced multi-administrative domain service deployments, open challenges from vertical Agreement (SLA) -based orchestration hazards. Through different proposed methodologies and demonstrated prototypes, this work showcases: the automated extraction of network function profiles; the manners to analyze how such profiles compose programmable network slice footprints; and the means to perform fine-grained auditable SLAs for end-to-end network slicing among multiple administrative domains. Sustained on state-of-the-art networking concepts, this work presents contributions by detecting roots on standardization efforts and best-of-breed open source embodiments, each one standing prominent future work topics in shape of its shortcomings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Yansen Xu ◽  
Ved P. Kafle

A service function chain (SFC) is an ordered virtual network function (VNF) chain for processing traffic flows to deliver end-to-end network services in a virtual networking environment. A challenging problem for an SFC in this context is to determine where to deploy VNFs and how to route traffic between VNFs of an SFC on a substrate network. In this paper, we formulate an SFC placement problem as an integer linear programing (ILP) model, and propose an availability-enhanced VNF placing scheme based on the layered graphs approach. To improve the availability of SFC deployment, our scheme distributes VNFs of an SFC to multiple substrate nodes to avoid a single point of failure. We conduct numerical analysis and computer simulation to validate the feasibility of our SFC scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms well in different network scenarios in terms of end-to-end delay of the SFC and computation time cost.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document