Acino: Report On The Design Of Programmability Elements For In-Operation Network Control

Sköldström Pontus, Junique Stéphane, Marsico Antonio
2017 Zenodo  
This ACINO deliverable presents the work performed in task "Design of the programmability elements for in-operation network control" to design the northbound interface of the ACINO orchestrator. The document begins with a review of the requirements of the northbound interface, derived from previous work done related to use cases and application requirements and the expected properties of the ACINO framework (see report "ACINO: The framework for the application-centric network orchestrator").
more » ... northbound interface of the orchestrator uses the intent paradigm: applications request what they want (in term of service properties), not how the requested services should be set up. This paradigm makes the interface potentially independent of the orchestrator, as it does not rely on the technical implementation of the control plane. Adopting an Intent-based interface as a standard for the orchestrator could make Software-Defined Networks much more popular, as applications communicating with them would 1) be easier to write (no knowledge of network technology required) and 2) not be tied to a specific orchestrator implementation. A review of the state of the art on the subject is presented in chapter 3. The document defines two northbound interfaces: the Dynamic Intent-driven Service Management Interface or DISMI, which allows applications to request network services, and the Multi-Layer Topology and Planning Interface or MLTPI, which is an interface used for management purposes (e.g. interfacing with Network Management Systems (NMS)). The network primitives exposed to applications through the DISMI are defined. Using the provided grammar, applications can combine them to build intents. The main types of primitives are: Actions, which describe the type of connection requested: point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or multipoint-to-multipoint, uni- or bi-directional; Nouns, which describe the network end points; Constraints, which specify the properties of the requested network service (bandwidth, delay, encry [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.581460 fatcat:65kzu6324resvbsrtrrdjbpjby