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 software-defined 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.