5G OS: Control and Orchestration of Services on Multi-Domain Heterogeneous 5G Infrastructures
Sevil Dräxler, Holger Karl, Hadi Razzaghi Kouchaksaraei, Azahar T. Machwe, Crispin Dent-Young, Kostas Katsalis, Konstantinos Samdanis · 2018
A heterogeneous 5G infrastructure includes physical and virtual computation, storage, and networking resources, exploiting different technologies and spanning across several administrative domains. These resources can be combined into end-to-end slices that can host different services. Services consist of virtual or physical elements and have different requirements, e.g., in terms of resource demands, latency, performance guarantees. The underlying resources need to be efficiently allocated to the slices and their corresponding services. To abstract away the complexities of the underlying 5G infrastructure and to provide the common functionalities required for efficient and flexible service and slice management and orchestration, we propose 5G Operating System (5G OS). We describe the requirements of such a system, present the high-level architecture of 5G OS, and describe the design challenges for different interfaces within 5G OS. Our proposed architecture includes scalable hierarchies of multi-domain and domain-specific slice and service orchestrators, software-defined network controllers, and network function virtualization management and orchestration frameworks.