Policy-based NFV management and orchestration

Softwarization of network functions running on commodity servers, switches, and storage by leveraging standard IT virtualization and cloud technologies has become a goal of communications service providers (CSPs). Management and orchestration (MANO) is crucial for achieving this network functions virtualization (NFV) vision. We propose an open platform for NFV that exposes APIs that can be consumed by other components of a MANO framework. This Enhanced Network Cloud Platform (ENCP) is based on a common policy-based framework. It employs a network appliance container (NAC) as an abstraction of a network function, and it uses predictive and proactive analytics for elasticity and virtual resource management. The architecture of ENCP is presented, and its prototype implementation is discussed.