5G-TRANSFORMER Service Orchestrator: design, implementation, and evaluation
Josep Mangues‐Bafalluy, Jorge Baranda, Iñaki Pascual, Ricardo Martínez, Luca Vettori, Giada Landi, Arturo Zurita, David Salama, Kiril Antevski, Jorge Martín‐Pérez, Dmitriy Andrushko, Konstantin Tomakh, Barbara Martini, Xi Li, Josep Xavier Salvat · 2019
5G networks will pose complex network management challenges due to the variety of vertical services they will need to serve and the diversity and heterogeneity of underlying infrastructure. The service orchestration functionality is fundamental to enable fulfilling the requirements of the different verticals while efficiently sharing the infrastructure resources. This paper details the 5G-TRANSFORMER service orchestrator implementation and operation. It also evaluates and profiles service creation time showing how the automation offered by the platform allows reducing it from hours to minutes. It also shows that the most time-consuming steps correspond to the deployment of the virtual network functions and post-deployment configuration, which consume one order of magnitude more time than the rest of steps (e.g., network creation, port creation).