Orchestration of IT/Cloud and Networks: From Inter-DC Interconnection to SDN/NFV 5G Services

The  so-called  5G  networks  promise  to  be  the foundations for the deployment of advanced services, conceived around the joint allocation and use of heterogeneous resources,including network, computing and storage. Resources are placed on  remote  locations  constrained  by  the  different  service requirements,  resulting  in  cloud  infrastructures  (as  pool  of resources) that need to be interconnected. The automation of the provisioning of such services relies on a generalized orchestra tion, defined as to the coherent coordination of heterogeneous systems, applied to common cases such as involving heterogeneous network domains in terms of control or data plane technologies, or cloud and network resources. Although cloud-computing platforms do
take into account the need to interconnect remote virtual machine instances, mostly rely on managing L2 overlays over L3 (IP). The integration  with  transport  networks  is  still  not  fully  achieved, including leveraging the advances in software defined networks and  transmission.  We  start  with  an  overview  of  network orchestration, considering different models; we extend them to take into account cloud manage ment while mentioning relevant existing initiatives and conclude with the NFV architecture.