Policy-based Orchestration of NFV Services in Software-Defined Networks Kostas Giotis, Yiannos Kryftis, Vasilis Maglaris Network Management & Optimal Design Laboratory (NETMODE) School of Electrical & Computer Engineering National Technical University of Athens 1st IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2015) April 15th, 2015 London, UK

Trends in Telcos Industry Telco networks demonstrate: Significant growth of traffic volumes Increased data rates Plethora of diverse network services SDN and NFV architectures promise: Increased business agility (speed up services deployment) Decreased operational costs Decoupling of services from the physical substrate

SDN and NFV overlook SDN Protocols NFV Architectures Multiple SDN protocols (OF, ForCES, Cisco OpFlex) OF is still dominant Delivers: Network programmability Decouple Data & Control Plane Listen & Handle Network Events No standardized protocols All approaches are based on the ETSI specification Delivers: Agile placement of networking services Service-driven virtual Networks Optimized usage of COTS Hardware devices

Delivery of agile services through SDN and NFV synergies Motivation Design Principles Formulate a baseline architecture to facilitate policy-driven dynamic methods for: management of SDN resources lifecycle management of VNFs and the associated data orchestration of multiple diverse VNFs to deliver Business Applications as NFV Services (i.e. Service Chains) Modular design that decouples: Hardware elements VNFs Business (NFV) Services Orchestration Information Model to uniformly describe network resources and functions Instantiate and Manage NFV Services, governed by policies

Architectural Components This schema permits: Selection of VNFs from a VNF Pool Use Policy-Engines to manipulate VNFs Combine Diverse VNFs to deliver NFV Services Physical Infrastructure Nodes Controllers VNF Pool Diverse VNFs “Templates” NFV Services Business Applications Service Chains NFV Orchestrator Mgmt Functions Information Model

Architectural Components Physical Infrastructure Nodes Controllers VNF Pool Diverse VNFs “Templates” NFV Services Business Applications Service Chains NFV Orchestrator Mgmt Functions Information Model Policy Engine: Policy-based management of substrate resources VNF Lifecycle Management Orchestration of NFV Services NFV Services consist of one or more VNFs, and: Deliver tailor-made Business Applications Interact with Diverse VNFs Implement Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FGs) Uniquely-identified substrate objects: Managed in an abstracted manner Agnostic to the actual substrate Use abstracted physical resources for: Programmable Network Functions templates Isolated instances

Policy-based NFV Orchestrator The management environment is divided in three layers The lower layer concerns policy based management for OF substrate resources, providing management enforcement methods on MOs representing them The middle layer deals with VNF lifecycle management. All VNF components are represented as MOs and their methods may include policy-based management actions to be executed on lower layer MOs The higher layer provides policy-based Orchestration of NFV Services. Each NFV Service extends the Managed Object Class and it includes the methods for capturing and creating events, and performing management actions on VNF components in the pool, based on high-level policies

Types of Policies Event-Condition-Action(ECA) Policies: They enforce control and management actions upon certain events within the managed environment, possibly causing reconfiguration of the system Authorization Policies: They define what actions Users with specific Roles can perform on Target MOs Role Assignment Policies: They are used to define different classes of Users, receiving different access privileges and usage priority on specific services provided by VNFs

Graphical overview of the classes in the Ontology The Policy Engine residing in the NFV Orchestrator stands for the management environment that encompasses a collection of Managed Objects (MOs) in hierarchical order, representing: Policies (i.e. Event-Condition-Action (ECA), authorization, role assignment) OF resources (i.e. Controller, Switch, Link, Port) VNF components and NFV services

Ponder2 Policy Framework For the development of VNF Orchestrator’s policy engine, the Ponder2 policy framework was selected: It supports all aforementioned policy types and it uses user- extensible management objects It was extended to represent the substrate resources, and the NFV Services as Managed Objects able to be managed by the policies Conflict Resolution

Prototype VNFs Monitoring VNF Network Embedder VNF Instruct for the acquisition of flow statistics Statistics are initially collected at the Controller Flow-stats request/reply event Capable to interface with different types of monitoring data managers E.g. sFlow Collector Map virtual paths to the physical substrate Upon User request Create e2e virtual links Clients are considered to be large scale customers e.g. content or alternate providers Do not require significant number of identifiers (we user VLANs)

Role-based Traffic Engineering NFV Service: Role-based Traffic Engineering Monitoring and N.E. VNFs are chained to create RbTE instances as a Business Application Client receives different type and quality of services 2 client tiers in prototype, regarding traffic routing: Tier 1: path with least utilized links (best effort) Tier 2: Shortest path – high priority

Case Study Traffic Engineering for CDN Caching Nodes CDN Providers deploy Caching Nodes inside the premises of other operators CDN Providers are treated as clients An Operator might host multiple Caching Nodes of different CDN providers

Proof-of-concept demonstration Experimental Results Proof-of-concept demonstration Indicative Role-based services functionality Future Work: Avoid path switching for Tier 1 clients when the link is not saturated Integrate a virtualization layer through a network hypervisor (e.g. OpenVirtex) for isolated, Policy-based Control Plane management.

Thank you! Kostas Giotis coyiotis@netmode.ntua.gr