Service automation at the Internet scale. An approach to automated cross-domain service production

The emergence of so-called "telco cloud" infrastructures, where operators leverage network resources, as well as computing and storage resources hosted in cloud infrastructures scattered across the Internet, is likely to catalyze the automated production of [TE 7 606] services that may involve resources operated by different players (operators, content providers, application providers, etc.). These different resources are combined to deploy services on an Internet-wide scale.

In addition to conventional connectivity services that could involve several partners, the scope of multifunctional services (e.g. virtual private network services with differentiated quality of service, services based on "slices" in 5G environments) extends beyond the boundaries of a single operator's domain (i.e. all network, computing and storage resources placed under the operating responsibility of a single administrative entity).

By way of example, roaming services provided by mobile operators are emblematic of cross-domain connectivity services where the user can make a call from any visited network in another country as long as the local operator to which that user has connected has a roaming contract with the mobile operator with which the user has subscribed.

Similarly, inter-domain Virtual Private Network (VPN) services based on MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks, which activate the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), have become commonplace. Such services involve the allocation of different resources, operated by different partners, to connect the various sites of a single customer who has subscribed to the connectivity service.

The difficulty in deploying such services lies essentially in production time: involving several partners in the composition and production of the service presupposes a cycle of negotiation between the partners that will enable them to reserve, allocate and exploit the resources provided by each of the partners. More than 20 years' experience of producing and operating inter-domain VPN services shows that such negotiations typically take several weeks, or even months, before the various parties reach agreement and actually proceed to allocate and activate the resources characteristic of the service.

The relatively recent introduction of network automation techniques such as SDN (Software-Defined Networking), possibly combined with techniques for virtualizing certain...