Integrating NFV-MANO with Wireless Services: Experiences and Testbed Development

Network Functions Virtualization Management and Orchestration (NFV-MANO) aims to provide a common interface for technology developers and service operators for the instantiation of virtual network functions over generic equipment. Nevertheless, although NFV-MANO is currently targeting datacenter operations and the deployment of virtual services (through Virtual Machines or containers), it can easily extend to generic networking devices, and alter their operation based on the deployed network functions. In this paper, we consider the case of a wireless testbed, with focus on wireless networking, and adopt the OpenSourceMANO framework for provisioning of services on top of the equipment. We provide the necessary extensions to the framework in order to deploy services over virtualized wireless network interfaces, hosted on the generic networking nodes of the testbed. The extensions we focus on regard the provisioning of virtual functions over wireless links, that are traditionally not handled by the framework, and allow easier interaction of the end-users with the testbed.