Coordination models for 5G multi-provider service orchestration: Specification and assessment

Abstract

The inherently multi-stakeholder value chain of 5G services calls for business and service coordination. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate coordination models for the multi-provider service composition, namely the Fully Centralized, Distributed and per-Provider Centralized models, in the context of the 5GEx multi-provider orchestration framework. We perform a scalability assessment of the models in terms of the message overhead, also investigating the trade-off between service composition efficiency and message overhead. Our sensitivity analysis on the different parameters of our evaluation framework reveal that hybrid models scale better, but also other models may achieve the same level of message overhead under certain conditions.