5G-TRANSFORMER Service Orchestrator: design, implementation, and evaluation

European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC 2019)5G networks will pose complex network management challenges due to the variety of vertical services they will need to serve and the diversity and heterogeneity of underlying infrastructure. The service orchestration functionality is fundamental to enable fulfilling the requirements of the different verticals while efficiently sharing the infrastructure resources. This paper details the 5G-TRANSFORMER service orchestrator implementation and operation. It also evaluates and profiles service creation time showing how the automation offered by the platform allows reducing it from hours to minutes. It also shows that the most time-consuming steps correspond to the deployment of the virtual network functions and post-deployment configuration, which consume one order of magnitude more time than the rest of steps (e.g., network creation, port creation).This work has been partially funded by the EC H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER Project (grant no. 761536) and grants TEC2017-88373-R (5G-REFINE) and 2017 SGR 1195