X–MANO: Cross–domain management and orchestration of network services

Abstract

The orchestration of network services is a well investigated problem. Standards and recommendation have been produced by ETSI and IETF while a significant body of scientific literature can be found exploring both the theoretical and practical aspects of the problem. Likewise several open-source as well as proprietary tools for network service orchestration are already available. Nevertheless, in most of these cases network services can only be provisioned across a single administrative domain effectively preventing end-to-end network service delivery across multiple Infrastructure Providers (InP). In this paper we present X-MANO, a cross-domain network service orchestration framework consisting in an inter-domain confidentially-presenting federation interface and in an information model for multi-domain network service life-cycle programmability. X-MANO is effectively deployment-agnostic and can be used in hierarchical, peer-to-peer and cascading (or recursive) configuration. We validate X-MANO trough a proof-of-concept implementation over a multi-domain testbed. Finally, we release all the code under a permissive APACHE 2.0 license making it available to researchers and practitioners.