Unifying Cloud and Carrier Network: EU FP7 Project UNIFY

Abstract

Telecom providers struggle with low service flexibility, increasing complexity and related costs. Although "cloud" has been an active field of research, there is currently little integration between the vast networking assets and data centres of telecom providers. UNIFY considers the entire network, from home networks up to data centre, as a "unified production environment" supporting virtualization, programmability and automation and guarantee a high level of agility for network operations and for deploying new, secure and quality services, seamlessly instantiatable across the entire infrastructure. UNIFY focuses on the required enablers and will develop an automated, dynamic service creation platform, leveraging fine-granular service chaining. A service abstraction model and a proper service creation language and a global orchestrator, with novel optimization algorithms, will enable the automatic optimal placement of networking, computing and storage components across the infrastructure. New management technologies based on experience from DCs, called Service Provider DevOps, will be developed and integrated into the orchestration architecture to cope with the dynamicity of services. The applicability of a universal node based on commodity hardware will be evaluated in order to support both network functions and traditional data centre workloads, with an investigation of the need of hardware acceleration.

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

“…5) UNIFY: UNIFY [91] is aimed at researching, developing and evaluating the means to orchestrate, verify and observe end-to-end service delivery from home and enterprise networks through aggregation and core networks to data centers. To this end, the project plans to develop an automated, dynamic service creation platform, leveraging a fine-granular service chaining architecture.…”

“…Yet, ICN may be used in NFV to determine the best position to place network functions. For example, Arumaithurai et al [198] propose a function-centric service chaining (FCSC) approach [111], [114], [115], [121] Vendor specific products for different components or specifications of the ETSI MANO framework Projects [85], [86], [88], [91], [92], [130], [131] Implementation and/or proposals based on the ETSI MANO framework…”

Deploying elastic routing capability in an SDN/NFV-enabled environment

“…The emulation environment used to deploy the elastic router service is developed in the aforementioned UNIFY project [1]. A high-level breakdown of this architecture is shown in figure 2.…”

“…Using new possibilities enabled by SDN/NFV, a service creation platform is being worked out in the UNIFY project [1]. It aims at unifying cloud and carrier network resources in a common orchestration framework.…”

A model to select the right infrastructure abstraction for Service Function Chaining

“…A service graph describes how the NFs are chained together to construct the network service. Multiple research groups/projects are focusing on SFC to address its limitations, like: i) the NFV group in ETSI [2], ii) a dedicated working group (Service Function Chaining Working Group) in IETF [1], [3] and iii) UNIFY [4] which is an EUfunded FP7 project.…”