Enabling Multi-domain and End-to-End Slice Orchestration for Virtualization Everything Functions (VxFs)

Abstract

The traditional business models exploited in networking are changing into industry verticals, which in turn builds new applications with striking and specific requirements. Therefore, the service-oriented, fully programmable, and flexible features that translate to sliced-capable networks are fundamentals in the design, deployment, and orchestration of networks such as 5G and beyond. Also, application consumption experiences are moving towards pervasiveness, and it is necessary to address the established inter-domain constraints uniformly. Leveraged by SDN, Cloud/Edge Computing, and NFV, several state-of-the-art proposals aim to address multi-domain slice deployment. However, they focus on multi-domain control plane efforts, leaving numerous data plane challenges openly. This paper seeks to overcome the multi-domain slice establishing issues through a source routing and BGP-based approach to provide slice abstraction to cope with application requirements. A proof-of-concept called NASOR was implemented and validated using VxFs use-cases. The results showcase its deployment suitability in traditional core networks and enhancement of the end-user experience.