Orchestration of mission-critical services over an NFV architecture

Abstract

In the race towards 5G, NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) arises as one of the enabler technologies. The intelligent orchestration of the network becomes a key element to achieve the demanded network slicing for an efficient allocation of the available shared virtualised resources. In this paper we propose an intelligent orchestration process of mission critical services over an NFV architecture. Mission critical services have tight requirements in terms of latency and high-availability that must be met in an end-to-end basis. Our proposal includes a monitoring system that collects performance data from the VNF (Virtual Network Function) instances in order to feed the decision-making process of the orchestrator and then elastically assign resources to the network service. The software components that compose our deployment are presented as well as the validation scenario in which the features of the test-bed are exposed.