MeDICINE: Rapid Prototyping of Production-Ready Network Services in Multi-PoP Environments

TL;DR

MeDICINE is a platform enabling rapid prototyping and testing of complex, multi-site network services with production-ready functions in a realistic, emulated environment on standard hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a novel NFV prototyping platform that supports multi-PoP environments with integration to management systems, facilitating realistic testing.

Findings

Supports execution of production-ready network functions as containers

Allows testing in realistic multi-PoP emulated environments

Enables control through standard management and orchestration interfaces

Abstract

Virtualized network services consisting of multiple individual network functions are already today deployed across multiple sites, so called multi-PoP (points of presence) environ- ments. This allows to improve service performance by optimizing its placement in the network. But prototyping and testing of these complex distributed software systems becomes extremely challenging. The reason is that not only the network service as such has to be tested but also its integration with management and orchestration systems. Existing solutions, like simulators, basic network emulators, or local cloud testbeds, do not support all aspects of these tasks. To this end, we introduce MeDICINE, a novel NFV prototyping platform that is able to execute production-ready network func- tions, provided as software containers, in an emulated multi-PoP environment. These network functions can be controlled by any third-party management and orchestration system that connects to our platform through standard interfaces. Based on this, a developer can use our platform to prototype and test complex network services in a realistic environment running on his laptop.