Intent-based approach to virtualized infrastructure management in SDN/NFV deployments

Telecommunication networks are meant to be efficient, transparent, and accessible to the broadest possible set of users. However, they are very complex systems, in which a large number of components cooperates, posing a challenge to the desired efficiency, transparency and ease of access. Emerging technological paradigms such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing open up to a whole new set of possible applications for the infrastructure, or better ways to implement traditional services, but also introduce new environments to be controlled. One of the main challenges in delivering end-to-end service chains across multiple SDN, NFV and Cloud domains is to achieve unified management and orchestration functions. A very critical aspect is the definition of an open, vendor-agnostic, and interoperable northbound interface (NBI) that should be as abstracted as possible from domain-specific data and control plane technologies, making the underlying infrastructure easier to be accessed, while still allowing a fair amount of flexibility and freedom in programmability of the network. In this document we describe a reference architecture and expand an intent-based NBI for end-to-end service orchestration across multiple technological domains. More specifically, we consider the use case of an Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure deployment and the corresponding Cloud-based data collection, processing, and publishing services, differentiating multiple Quality of Service (QoS) classes. Finally we report the experimental validation of the proposed architecture over a heterogeneous, multi-domain SDN test bed.