A Northbound Interface for Software-based Networks

The current shift from traditional network architectures to software-based solutions is offering new opportunities to allow network functionality to be managed in a flexible way. Substantial efforts have been invested in the recent years in the development of new network management approaches taking advantage of emerging paradigms such as software-defined networking and network function virtualization. Until now however there has not been much progress in the development of a northbound interface (NBI) linking high-level requirements (HLRs) capturing business objectives to management operations. This is a crucial functionality to facilitate faster service deployment and realization of business objectives. In this paper we extend the efforts towards the development of a NBI and propose a novel approach for the automatic decomposition of HLRs to network management operations. We demonstrate its functionality based on representative use cases and evaluate its feasibility through prototype implementation. The results obtained show that our solution can translate new technical requirements to network configurations in the order of a few seconds, thus enabling the management of network functionality and services in short timescales.