Inter-domain orchestration for verticals in 5G network services

• Autor(a) principal: Alegria, João Pedro Simões
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/32335
• topic: 5G; NFV; MANO; Virtualization; Inter-domain; Orchestration

With the proliferation of 5G technologies, both operators and verticals are increasingly interested in using its capabilities. By supporting these technologies, operators can stop using specialized networking hardware, such as routers and switches, and start virtualizing their functions, using commercially available servers to run their services and networks. Virtualization considerably reduces costs while increasing the number of scenarios supported without changing the infrastructure. On the other hand, verticals are increasingly interested in the performance guarantees the 5G technologies provide. With the developments in this area and the appearance of more complex scenarios, the use of inter-domain network services appears as a solution for some use-cases. Currently, the approaches used to implement the inter-domain mechanism are restrictive and mainly managed by operators, which needs to be balanced by giving some power to the verticals. This thesis’ work addresses the current problems in inter-domain 5G network services orchestration for verticals by creating a new orchestration platform called Network Orchestrator( NetOr). After analyzing the state-of-the-art solutions and identifying their problems, I concluded that the NetOr should solve the monolithic architectures, the nonstandardized network slicing, and the incomplete inter-domain support. After developing the system, it was extensively tested with different approaches, which demanded the creation of many entities and configuration structures, such as VNFs, NSDs, and NSTs. Those tests included unit tests, functional tests, and performance tests, comparing the gathered values with the most mature stateof- the-art vertical service orchestration solution. These tests focused on using the inter-domain mechanism integrated into the new NetOr system in a network slicing scenario. The results obtained from those tests proved that the NetOr is a promising platform, being comparable to the best available vertical service orchestration solutions. Further future developments over the NetOr system are needed to make it a more competitive solution in the vertical network service orchestration arena.