Improving mobile business process monitoring with enhanced NFV MANO: a method to elicit connectivity requirements from process models

The ability of 5G networks to fulfill Quality of Service (QoS) constraints by properly organizing the available resources opens the possibility to rely on this type of connectivity for monitoring purposes. In fact, especially in case of a mobile business process, where smart devices can be used to monitor activities executed on changing locations outside the organizations' premises, a reliable exchange of monitoring data is mandatory. Although the NFV MANO provides support to allocate a Virtual Network (VN) based on specific QoS constraints, these constraints are expected to be static during its life. Conversely, the connectivity requirements could vary during the execution of a business process, depending on the status of the process itself. Goal of this paper is to make more fruitful the marriage between mobile business processes and NFV MANO exploiting the knowledge of how the QoS constraints are changing in specific sets of processes. To this aim, the paper presents a method to elicit location-and time-varying connectivity requirements based on the monitoring requirements for a process model, and to automatically derive QoS constraints for the network services. This method can then be used to drive the configuration of future NFV MANO platforms supporting dynamic QoS constraints.