A Fully Integrated Multi-Platform NFV SDK

A key challenge of network function virtualization (NFV) is the complexity of developing and deploying new network services. Currently, development requires many manual steps that are time-consuming and error-prone (e.g., for creating service descriptors). Furthermore, existing management and orchestration (MANO) platforms only offer limited support of standardized descriptor models or package formats, limiting the re-usability of network services.To this end, we introduce a fully integrated, open-source NFV service development kit (SDK) with multi-MANO platform support. Our SDK simplifies many NFV service development steps by offering initial generation of descriptors, advanced project management, as well as fully automated packaging and submission for on-boarding. To achieve multi-platform support, we present a package format that extends ETSI’s VNF package format. In this demonstration, we present the end-to-end work-flow to develop an NFV service that is then packaged for multiple platforms, i.e., 5GTANGO and OSM.

[1]  Holger Karl,et al.  MeDICINE: Rapid prototyping of production-ready network services in multi-PoP environments , 2016, 2016 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN).

[2]  Didier Colle,et al.  A network service development kit supporting the end-to-end lifecycle of NFV-based telecom services , 2017, 2017 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN).