Up in the clouds: A Taxonomical Analysis of Network Management Functionalities from a Network as a Service Perspective

The externalization of network control and maintenance tasks, enabled by the emerging Networking as a Service (NaaS) paradigm, is an appealing opportunity for large Telcos to expand their network management offering to SMEs. In this paper we propose an architecture for network control and management capable of efficiently supporting the NaaS paradigm. Our methodology is based on a set of orthogonal requirements that forms the platform to assess the admissibility of different network management functions in the remote management plane. Such assessments are realized based on the taxonomical evaluation of the management functions classified according to the requirements they impose on the remote management plane in terms of security and robustness. Experimental results obtained from a proof-of-concept implementation deployed over a large scale testbed composed of about 500 WiFi Access Points shows that the signaling traffic for a practical implementation supporting not trivial autonomic control loops is lower that 20 bytes/s for each node. Moreover, the latency to execute administrative actions is in most cases in the order of 70 ms.