IEEE Softwarization - July 2017
A collection of short technical articles

Overview of NetSoft 2017 Best Paper: “Catena: A Distributed Architecture for Robust Service Function Chain Instantiation with Guarantees”

By Flavio Esposito, Saint Louis University, USA

To offer wide-area distributed virtual network services, resources from multiple end-users and federated or geo-distributed) providers need to be managed. Such virtual resource management is, however, very complex, given the scale and constraints required by various applications. Moreover, multiple virtual network functions need to coexist in support of service function chains. For example, in an edge computing scenario supporting first responders in case of a natural or man-made disaster, or to support remote data-intensive edge processing for medical applications, service functions involving edge clouds (i.e. edge functions) are needed. Edge functions may range from management plane mechanisms, such as load balancing, firewalls, data acceleration, intrusion detection, network address translators or deep-packet inspections to data plane mechanisms, such as congestion control and network scheduling.

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Overview of NetSoft 2017 Paper: “X–MANO: Cross–domain Management and Orchestration of Network Services”

By Antonio Francescon, FBK CREATE-NET, Italy; Giovanni Baggio, FBK CREATE-NET, Italy; Riccardo Fedrizzi, FBK CREATE-NET, Italy; Ramon Ferrus, UPC, Spain; Imen Grida Ben Yahia, Orange Labs, France; and Roberto Riggio, FBK CREATE-NET, Italy

The orchestration of network services is a well investigated problem. Standards and recommendation have been produced by ETSI and IETF while a significant body of scientific literature can be found exploring both the theoretical and practical aspects of the problem. Likewise several open–source as well as proprietary tools for network service orchestration are already available. Nevertheless, in most of these cases network services can only be provisioned across a single administrative domain effectively preventing end–to–end network service delivery across multiple Infrastructure Providers (InP).

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Transient Performance: Scoping the Challenges for SDN

By Neil Davies and Peter Thompson, Predictable Network Solutions Ltd.

The delivered real-time performance of networks is becoming ever more important, especially as applications increasingly become interacting collections of micro-services, dependent on each other and the connectivity between them. Typical network performance measures such as speed tests or MRTG reports represent only averages over periods that are very long compared to the response times of such services. The assumption that such averages provide a reliable guide to the performance over much shorter intervals is just that: an assumption, and one that becomes increasingly questionable as new technologies such as SDN introduce rapid and frequent network reconfigurations.

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Towards the World Brain with SDN & NFV

By Chris Hrivnak, The Nemacolin Group

In early January 2017, in Las Vegas at their World Developer Summit, AT&T executive John Stankey announced AT&T is no longer "the phone company," but rather "the open-source software-defined networks company." What a change!