The demo paper “Deploying Hybrid Network Services: Mixing VNFs and CNFs in Multi-site Infrastructures” has received the best Demonstration Award in the IEEE Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (IEEE SECON’21).
This work has been authored by CTTC researchers Mr. Jorge Baranda, Josep Mangues-Bafalluy, Ph.D., Mr. Luca Vettori, Ricardo Martínez, Ph.D., and Engin Zeydan, Ph.D. in the context of the H2020 European 5Growth project.
Next generation mobile networks base on the automated, flexible, and dynamic orchestration of virtualised network services (NSs). Normally, NSs are made up of Virtual Network Functions, which have hitherto mostly been implemented by means of virtual machines. The current trend is to include the use of containers, the so-called Cloud-native Network Functions, which may fit better the need of NS deployments embracing edge infrastructures having constrained resources. This ends up in the definition of Hybrid NSs mixing both kinds of network functions (NFs) satisfying the needs of network operators and vertical industries and the characteristics of available infrastructures. Hybrid NSs give a higher degree of flexibility to NS designers at the time to define vertical services. This demonstration presents the extensions done in the 5Growth management and orchestration platform to perform the deployment of Hybrid NSs in a multi-site infrastructure, including the dynamic interconnection of the deployed NFs according to their nature.
