Mimicking a compute domain orchestrator with the ONOS SDN controller

With the NFV paradigm, network services are usually instantiated in datacenters (e.g., as VMs), while softwaredefined networks provide just plain connectivity. However, common SDN controllers can do much more than just traffic steering; particularly they can execute network applications such as NAT, DHCP, and more. This paper presents a software architecture that can advertise an SDN domain as having compute capabilities, hence enabling an overarching multi-domain orchestrator to instantiate a network function either in a cloud or in an SDN domain. This allows an overarching orchestrator to fully exploit the processing capability of an SDN infrastructure and potentially enabling more aggressive optimization strategies across domains.