Towards an Open-Source NFV Management and Orchestration Framework

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is continuously gaining immense attention from service providers, academia, and industry as an important paradigm in service provisioning. NFV separates the Network Functions (NFs) from the hardware on which they run, enabling pure software-based network functions, called Virtual Network Function (VNF) that run on top of the Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server. NFV has the potential to reduce CAPEX and OPEX, make the network more flexible/scalable, and increase agility to deploy new services. NFV merges with Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology and allows network service providers to create a dynamic Network Service (NS), where VNFs are dynamically chained and deployed on demand. The ETSI standard developed Management and Orchestration (MANO) framework consists of NFV Orchestrator (NFVO), VNF Manager (VNFM), Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) capabilities to handle the dynamic aspects of NS, infrastructure, and VNFs. In this paper, we provide comparison between five most widely accepted open-source NFV-MANO frameworks. We also provide Layered taxonomy to characterize the MANO frameworks based on their functional characteristics. Finally, we identify Management and Orchestration challenges.