Automated Design of Network Services from Network Service Requirements

The ETSI Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has defined the NFV Management and Orchestration (NFV-MANO) framework and a set of concepts for the rapid provisioning, deployment, and management of Network Services (NSs). To do so the NFV-MANO expects as input a description of the NS. Thus, one has to come up with the design of the NS and its descriptor, which contains all the details required for the deployment and management of the NS. In this paper, we propose an approach for automating the design of NSs. The approach starts with NS Requirements (NSReq) - an intent that describes the requested service at a high level of abstraction focusing on its functional, non-functional and/or architectural characteristics. With the help of a Network Function (NF) ontology, which captures the knowledge about NSs, NFs and their relations from past designs and possibly standards, we transform the NSReq through successive steps to a level where Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) can be selected from a VNF catalog and put together in VNF Forwarding Graphs (VNFFGs) to form a NS, which is then dimensioned and tailored according to the non-functional requirements.