SONATA: Service programming and orchestration for virtualized software networks

Abstract

In conventional large-scale networks, creation and management of network services are costly and complex tasks that often consume a lot of resources, including time and manpower. Network softwarization and network function virtualization have been introduced to tackle these problems. They replace the hardware-based network service components and network control mechanisms with software components running on general-purpose hardware, aiming at decreasing costs and complexity of implementing new services, maintaining the implemented services, and managing available resources in service provisioning platforms and underlying infrastructures. To experience the full potential of these approaches, innovative development support tools and service provisioning environments are needed. To answer these needs, we introduce the SONATA architecture, a service programming, orchestration, and management framework. We present a development toolchain for virtualized network services, fully integrated with a service platform and orchestration system. We motivate the modular and flexible architecture of our system and discuss its main components and features, such as function-and service-specific managers that allow fine-grained service management, slicing support to facilitate multi-tenancy, recursiveness for improved scalability, and full-featured DevOps support.

5G network slicing using SDN and NFV: A survey of taxonomy, architectures and future challenges

“…Authors in [282] investigate the resource allocation problem of achieving maximum capacity with the transmit power, allocated bandwidth as part of the constraints in a sliced multi-tenant network. A network slice manager in SONATA Service Platform (SP) [256] is proposed in [282] for multi-site NFVI-PoP that supports multi-tenancy. NESMO is among the recent network slicing management and orchestration architecture proposed in [101] that extend the 3GPP management reference framework [83] .…”

Network Service Orchestration: A survey

“…The major components of the SONATA architecture consist of two parts: (i) the SONATA Software Development Kit (SDK) that supports functionalities and tools for the development and validation of VNFs and NS and (ii) the SONATA Service Platform, which offers the functionalities to orchestrate and manage network services during their lifecycles with a MANO framework and interact with the underlying virtual infrastructure through Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM) and WAN Infrastructure Managers (WIM) [27].…”

“…Softwarized networks modify the way how services are deployed replacing the hardware-based network service components with software-based solutions [27]. Through technologies such as SDN and NFV, such network can provide automation, programmability, and flexibility.…”

Hierarchical service providers on sliced infrastructure

“…This was chosen as the 5GEx system was originally conceived and built to be a multi‐domain orchestrator. At the lower level of the orchestration hierarchy, an instance of the SONATA Service Platform is deployed to operate on the resources of its own segment of the NFVI, and behaving as a local Domain Orchestrator, connected to the top 5GEx MANO via the SONATA Domain Adapter.…”

“…This section further describes the architectural elements utilized in the context of a 5G‐PPP cross‐projects activity aimed at the realization of a multi‐MANO HSP scenario leveraging on the systems developed by the 5GEx and SONATA EU projects. Relevant data models, abstractions and interfaces from the above projects, which are relevant for the implementation of the inter‐working multi‐MANO system, are presented to highlight how end‐to‐end network services can be deployed on multi‐domain end‐to‐end slices using a 5GEx MANO and one or more instances of a SONATA MANO.…”