Efficient restoration of simultaneous transport services within an NFV infrastructure

Abstract

In 5G networks, heterogeneous vertical services with different requirements are rolled out over a common multi-technology infrastructure. A resource orchestrator entity automatically coordinates the operations and functions to support the service's lifecycle management (i.e., creation, update and termination). Moreover, it is essential that service needs are continuously assured even if transport network anomalies (e.g., link failures) occur. Herein, we present an implemented resource orchestrator architecture integrating monitoring capabilities to attain closed-loop operations for: i) gathering monitored information; ii) detecting transport network anomalies; and iii) triggering the required action (e.g., restoration) to keep the service continuity. When a link failure happens, several transport services may be disrupted requiring to be immediately restored. To this end, we propose a novel on-line restoration algorithm called as Global Concurrent Optimization (GCO). The GCO algorithm aims at attaining an enhanced restorability performance compared to a more traditional restoration algorithm (referred to as 1-by-1). Both algorithms are experimentally compared on top of the deployed resource orchestrator architecture. The evaluation is done upon both dynamic service arrival/departure and link failure generation using different performance metrics: the average restorability, the average network resource utilization, and the restoration computational time.