A Mobile Transport Platform Interconnecting VNFs over a Multi-Domain Optical/Wireless Network: Design and Implementat

Vertical industries see 5G networks as an appealing context to enhance their offered services, capabilities, and products. In the 5G context, such services are formed by a set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), likely deployed across distributed datacenters (DCs). The interconnection of remote VNFs is done over a wide area network (WAN) transport infrastructure. In a generic scenario, the transport network may entail heterogenous technologies such as optical, packet, and wireless. Hence, the goal is to provide the orchestration mechanisms being able to dynamically compute, select and configure the different kind of needed resources to effectively accommodate NSs while satisfying their specific requirements. This problem has been investigated in the EC 5G-TRANSFORMER (5GT) project. One of the outcomes of this project was to provide a unified platform providing the automatic deployment of NSs for different verticals over a shared infrastructure. A key element of this 5GT system is the Mobile Transport and Computing Platform (5GT-MTP), which provides the means to allocate heterogenous (network and cloud) resources to roll out targeted NSs. Herein we describe and experimentally validate an implementation of the 5GT-MTP controlling a multi-layer network infrastructure combining optical, packet, and wireless technologies connecting VNFs distributed into two NFVI-Points of Presence.