Enabling the SLA Management of Federated Network Services through Scaling Operations

Slices are deployed to continuously fulfill requirements from vertical industries. Thus, the management of service level agreements (SLAs) is fundamental. Composite network services (NSs), made up of multiple nested NSs, can be exploited to build slices. Generally, slices may span multiple domains and the different nested NSs may be deployed by different providers, in what is referred to as federated NS. Previous work focused on the architectural design and workflows for the functional deployment of federated services without considering the continuous SLA management. Herein, we cover this gap by presenting a complete workflow, the required interface extensions, and the operation profiling over an experimental testbed to automatically scale nested NSs deployed in a federated domain. Evaluation results show that such scale out/in operations can be performed in tens of seconds (39/31 s, respectively), where the allocation/release of underlying resources account for most of the profiled scaling time (more than 80%). © 2022 IEEE.