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).

This paper presents the design of the 5GT Service Orchestrator (SO), which is one of the key components of the 5G-TRANSFORMER (5GT) system for the deployment of vertical services. Depending on the requests from verticals, the 5GT-SO offers service or resource orchestration and federation. These functions include all tasks related to coordinating and providing the vertical with an integrated view of services and resources from multiple administrative domains. In particular, service orchestration entails managing end-to-end services that are split into various domains based on requirements and availability. Federation entails managing administrative relations at the interface between the SOs belonging to different domains and handling abstraction of services. The SO key functionalities, architecture, interfaces, as well as two sample use cases for service federation and service and resource orchestration are presented. Results for the latter use case show that a vertical service is deployed in the order of minutes.

This document analyzes the problem of multi-provider multi-domain orchestration, by first scoping the problem, then looking into potential architectural approaches, and finally describing the solutions being developed by the European 5GEx and 5G-TRANSFORMER projects.

The next generation mobile transport networks shall transform into flexible and agile SDN/NFV-based transport and computing platforms, capable of simultaneously supporting the needs of different vertical industries, e.g., automotive, e-health and media, by meeting a diverse range of networking and computing requirements. Network slicing, has emerged as the most promising approach to address this challenge by enabling per-slice management of virtualized resources and provisioning and managing slices tailored to the needs of different vertical industries. Service orchestration is the key enabler for slicing that allows efficient placement of virtual network functions over the infrastructure as well as optimal allocation of virtual resources among all network slices to deliver guaranteed, reliable and scalable services of different verticals. Besides, due to the limited footprint of infrastructure operators, it is also required to enable the interconnection and federation of multiple administrative domains, to effectively allow services to span across several providers. This paper presents the design of Service Orchestrator (SO) in the 5G-TRANSFORMER system, which deals with service orchestration and federation across multiple domains.