Service Orchestration over Wireless Network Slices: Testbed Setup and Integration

Network Functions Virtualization Management and Orchestration (NFV-MANO) provides a standardized approach for the management and effortless deployment of (virtual) services. Although NFV-MANO initially focused on the deployment of services over datacenters, the introduction of fully softwarized network architectures even for the wireless network creates fertile ground for the re-conception of the manner through which the underlying hardware is managed. In this article, we consider the case of an open experimentation testbed, with focus on wireless networking, and adopt the Open Source MANO framework for provisioning virtual services on top of the experimentation equipment. We extend the Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIMs) of the NFV-MANO architecture in two well-known frameworks (Openstack and OpenVIM) for the testbed in order to create and handle virtualized wireless network interfaces, hosted on the generic networking nodes of the testbed. Through our contributions, existing VNFs can be deployed over the testbed interconnected over wireless links, specified during the on-boarding phase. The extensions are introduced transparently to the existing operation of the platform, in order to allow the portability of network services and network functions to other instances as well. We focus on providing virtual functions inter-networked over wireless links, which traditionally are not handled by the framework, and allow easier interaction of the end-users with the testbed. We benchmark the framework in terms of performance and analyze the deployment case of a softwarized 5G Radio Access Network in a real testbed deployment.