Orchestration of IT/cloud and networks: From Inter-DC interconnection to SDN/NFV 5G services

The so-called 5G networks promise to be the foundations for the deployment of advanced services, conceived around the joint allocation and use of heterogeneous resources, including network, computing and storage. Resources are placed on remote locations constrained by the different service requirements, resulting in cloud infrastructures (as pool of resources) that need to be interconnected. The automation of the provisioning of such services relies on a generalized orchestration, defined as to the coherent coordination of heterogeneous systems, applied to common cases such as involving heterogeneous network domains in terms of control or data plane technologies, or cloud and network resources. Although cloud-computing platforms do take into account the need to interconnect remote virtual machine instances, mostly rely on managing L2 overlays over L3 (IP). The integration with transport networks is still not fully achieved, including leveraging the advances in software defined networks and transmission. We start with an overview of network orchestration, considering different models; we extend them to take into account cloud management while mentioning relevant existing initiatives and conclude with the NFV architecture.