Network Service Orchestration: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews the evolution, key concepts, and current research on Network Service Orchestration (NSO), highlighting challenges, enabling technologies, and standardization efforts in the context of modern network demands.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of NSO approaches, summarizes historical and current research, and identifies open challenges and future research directions.

Findings

Taxonomy of NSO approaches and solutions

Identification of key enabling technologies and standards

Open challenges and research opportunities in NSO

Abstract

Business models of network service providers are undergoing an evolving transformation fueled by vertical customer demands and technological advances such as 5G, Software Defined Networking~(SDN), and Network Function Virtualization~(NFV). Emerging scenarios call for agile network services consuming network, storage, and compute resources across heterogeneous infrastructures and administrative domains. Coordinating resource control and service creation across interconnected domains and diverse technologies becomes a grand challenge. Research and development efforts are being devoted to enabling orchestration processes to automate, coordinate, and manage the deployment and operation of network services. In this survey, we delve into the topic of Network Service Orchestration~(NSO) by reviewing the historical background, relevant research projects, enabling technologies, and standardization activities. We define key concepts and propose a taxonomy of NSO approaches and solutions to pave the way towards a common understanding of the various ongoing efforts around the realization of diverse NSO application scenarios. Based on the analysis of the state of affairs, we present a series of open challenges and research opportunities, altogether contributing to a timely and comprehensive survey on the vibrant and strategic topic of network service orchestration.