Programmable and Flexible Management and Orchestration of Virtualized Network Functions

Supporting the vast variety of network services’ management and orchestration requirements is one of the main challenges that Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is dealing with. While general management requirements such as Virtual Network Function (VNF) resource requirements can be specified by the service developers using service descriptors, specific management operations like VNF-specific configuration cannot be performed by these descriptors. On the other hand, it is inefficient and also very challenging for Management and Orchestration (MANO) frameworks to provide all specific-management operations for every individual network service and their constituent VNFs. To mitigate this issue, we propose the use of service-specific programs called Specific Managers (SMs) that can customize management and orchestration of network services and also extend the capability of MANO frameworks to support per-service management and orchestration. The results of our evaluation show that the higher flexibility and programmability enabled by SMs improve the performance of the service performance and also utilises the service provider resources more efficiently.